Showing results by narrator "James Clamp" in All Categories

It's been eighteen years since Josh Peters left dreary, dying Derton - the seaside town where he grew up - and headed for the bright lights of London. Now his dad is sick and his mum needs him, so he's back - though he's promised himself he won't be staying for long.... Then Josh finds himself unexpectedly detained in Derton, living in his cramped teenage bedroom, with simmering family tensions a little too close for comfort.

In 1830s London, scandalous whispers surround the pub known as the Sleeping Dove, a hidden bordello catering to nobles eager to shed the trappings of their stations. Josephine Grant knows the rumors are true - she plays piano at the Dove and is known only as the “Bawdy Bluestocking” to the pub’s faithful.

Gerald Wilkins never considered himself a particularly exceptional 13-year-old. But that was before he inherited 20 billion pounds, a Caribbean island, a yacht, and three estates from a great-aunt he never knew. With this fortune, however, comes a letter. One from his great-aunt Geraldine. One that tells Gerald that she was murdered, and that it's up to him to find out why.

It should be an open-and-shut case. Samuel Szajkowski, a recently hired history teacher, walked into a school assembly with a gun and murdered three students and a colleague before turning the weapon on himself. It was a tragedy that could not have been predicted. Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Yet as Detective Inspector Lucia May begins to piece together the testimonies of the various witnesses, an uglier and more complex picture emerges.

Snatched up by an unscrupulous and abusive showman, Wild Boy, covered in hair from head to toe, becomes a sideshow freak. Isolated from other children and wickedly abused by the cruel master who bought him, Wild Boy becomes an avid observer, developing Sherlock Holmes - like deductive skills. Although he is tormented and insulted, kicked and spat at, his quick mind takes in everything he sees. When a murder occurs at the fair, Wild Boy is hastily accused. Can he use his powers of deduction to save himself?

Little Sister has vanished. The prototype device - real name IPD400 - has powers of surveillance that governments and terrorist organizations would kill for. They might yet. James Palatine, a trained killer with a surplus of conscience, invented the device and is the only person who can operate it. He's determined to retrieve it, and so is Natalya Kocharian - the arms dealer who "inadvertently" sold the prototype to a rogue dealer.

As a child, Elisha witnessed the burning of a witch outside of London, and saw her transformed into an angel at the moment of her death, though all around him denied this vision. He swore that the next time he might have the chance to bind an angel’s wounds, he would be ready. And so he became a barber-surgeon, at the lowest ranks of the medical profession, following the only healer’s path available to a peasant’s son. Elisha is good at his work, but skill alone cannot protect him. In a single catastrophic day, Elisha’s attempt to deliver his brother’s child leaves his family ruined, and Elisha himself accused of murder.

As dodgy English towns go, Mangel doesn’t look like much; but it’s everything to Royston Blake. In Mangel, Blake is head doorman at Hoppers Wine Bar and Bistro, drives a Ford Capri 2.8i, and generally has no trouble getting laid. On any given day, he can walk the streets of his town knowing he’s respected by one and all. That is, until a rumor begins to circulate that Blake’s "lost his bottle", and everything goes to hell. Even his best mates, Fin and Legsy, have heard the talk that the formerly hard-living bruiser has gone soft, lost his edge, and become a pushover in a town where he can ill afford it.

James Thatcher is content with the life of a privateer captain. He has his ship, he has his crew, and he has the open sea. Then, with the stroke of a pen, his world is turned on its head. Britain signs an unthinkable treaty with Spain, and this is the change in the political winds that the crooked governor of Jamaica has been waiting for. In a sudden, calculated act of betrayal, Governor Pendleton brands Thatcher’s crew and much of the privateer fleet as pirates.

When Hal's family makes the heart-wrenching decision to leave Charley, their comatose daughter, behind in a hospital ward while they spend the summer on the west coast of England, Hal finds it harder than ever to shake his sister's presence. What power is letting him share her memories? And will they reveal the deep, dark truth behind her tragic "accident"?

Released after a three-year stretch in a mental institution, Royston Blake finds that the world has moved on, even Mangel. Gone are most of his old haunts, including Hoppers, where he spent years working the door. In its place: a huge, gleaming new shopping mall, servicing the town’s every consumer need. But not everyone is happy to see the old ways swept aside. A mysterious opposition group calling itself the "Old Guard" has made its mission abundantly clear on the letters page of the local newspaper, and soon sets about trying to recruit Blake as its agent of retribution.

London, 1842. Wild Boy, master detective and former freak-show performer, and Clarissa, circus acrobat and troublemaker, are the secret last hope of a city beset by horror. A poisoner stalks the streets, leaving victims mad with terror - and then dead. Can the Black Terror be traced to a demon called Malphas? With their partnership threatened by rules and regulations, can Wild Boy and Clarissa uncover a cure in time to save the queen and the city?

It’s the 22nd century and, thanks to climate change, much of the former British Empire rests under the sea. While out fishing one day, young Lilly Melkun witnesses a brazen band of pirates kidnapping the Prime Minister’s daughter. With her village blamed for the tragedy, Lilly takes it upon herself to set sail and rescue the young girl, with only her wits and considerable seamanship skills to help her.

In the second installment of Charlie Williams’s violent and darkly comedic Mangel series, Royston Blake’s gig as head doorman at Hoppers finds him yet again mired belly-deep in trouble. Blake has noticed a change in the behavior of Hoppers’ already dodgy clientele - the norm of beery violence and lechery has given way to trance-like stares and nonsensical blatherings.

There’s bad stuff out there. Folks reckon things like vampires don't exist, but they does - Jock from the burger van told me. Plus I found an actual one of ’em, sleeping at the time in the back of a hearse I nicked that first morning. That's how me and Jock got to setting out freeing the world of ’em, using his bag o’ wooden stakes and special bottles of whisky. Course, I knowed that vampires didn’t exist, not when I stopped and done some thinking. And I knowed Jock had mental wossnames, what with his son falling off that roof and him reckoning them immigrants pushed him.

When the world gets more frightening, what do you do? Do you hide in your basement, watching 24-hour rolling news about the latest crimes? And what happens when it comes knocking on your door? Do you double-check those locks? Or do what Hamlet did, taking arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them? Pub-doorman-turned-recluse Royston Blake has never heard of Hamlet, but when headless corpses start turning up all over Mangel, he decides to do just that. And what better way to fight evil than by becoming a cop? Who cares if they all say you’re the worst kind of copper a town needs? What matters is results, right?

Kosovo, 1999. In the shadow of an impending NATO bombing campaign, James Palatine of the Army Intelligence Corps has joined an elite unit of the SAS for his first mission behind enemy lines. A woman's desperate cry for help draws them to a remote farmhouse, where Palatine makes a split-second decision that he bitterly regrets. Just hours later he sees a chance to redeem himself - in his own eyes, at least - when his unit finds a young girl close to death in the freezing woods