Showing results by narrator "Ciaran Saward" in All Categories

Conrad’s 11x great grandfather has been haunting his house since 1622, keeping a secret and biding his time. A secret that spells trouble for the world of magick. The King’s Watch want to Summon him. The keepers of the secret don’t want that to happen. They unleash a fire Mage to stop the summoning and don’t care who dies on the way. And when Spectre Thomas finally makes an appearance, he passes the guilt of old sins on to Conrad’s shoulders.

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR.

The nation of Torwyn is run on the power of industry, and industry is run by the Guilds. Chief among them are the Hawkspurs, whose responsibility it is to keep the gears of the empire turning. That’s exactly why matriarch Rosomon Hawkspur sends each of her heirs to the far reaches of the nation. Conall, the eldest son, is sent to the distant frontier to earn his stripes in the military. It is here that he faces a threat he could have never seen coming: the first rumblings of revolution.

Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phone book, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans. But a seemingly harmless late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into daytime meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker when Seth brings Hadley home.... And someone is watching....

The latest freshers have more than fitting in to fear when a forbidden entity is unleashed in an ancient seat of learning. New arrivals Nick and Annabel feel out of place at university, but when they are attacked by a creature straight out of their worst nightmares, their first term becomes less pass-fail than do-or-die. As the bodies pile up, their college’s dark secret cannot stay hidden for long. And when their tutors fall prey to mysterious forces, can Nick and Annabel enroll the night climber Giles to help banish the beast before freshers’ year becomes their last?

Eight jobs. Eight specialists in modern technology required. Applicants to be married, with no children, and prepared to travel. Highly persuasive salaries. Eight positions filled. Eight scientists – and their wives – disappear. Completely. Advertisement no.9. Sydney, Australia. Fuel specialist required. Looks like a job for John Bentall.

Ravi Gupta’s dark secret is unravelling. After years of hiding a dangerous portal discovered through foolish magic, the regretful academic worries his brilliant student has recklessly used it to travel to an alien world. And though he’s loath to go back, he stealthily opens a passage and journeys to the perilous land, desperate to save the missing scholar.

Conrad has a lot on his plate, and recovering from a punctured kidney is only the start. Top of his to-do list is a trip to Cornwall for an interview with Morwenna Mowbray, vessel and victim of Fae magick. Before he can go, Tom Morton has news on the missing book, the Codex Defanatus. And soon it becomes clear that all roads lead across the Irish Sea, to a country where Conrad has no jurisdiction, no allies, and where his enemies are not one, but two Fae queens.

In Clerkswell, the great and the good assemble for a Samhain party. In Manchester, mages prepare for the Warden Hustings. But on a tree in the Furness Peninsula hangs the body of a man. Someone thinks they have settled a score, but all they’ve done is start a feud. A storm is brewing, and Conrad has to stop it turning into all-out war. Fate has dealt him a difficult hand—another new partner, the implacable opposition of the Lakeland Mages, and having to shield the members of his non-magickal team. So Conrad does what he does best: grits his teeth and rides into the storm.

In a sleepy Devon village, a woman is taken from the streets. Local vet Jenny is horrified. This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. But it’s not the first time she’s been so close to a crime scene. The daughter of a prolific serial killer, she’s spent her whole life running from who she really is. And the crime is harrowingly similar to those her father committed all those years ago.

Stranded at Schiphol airport, Ben Coates called up a friendly Dutch girl he'd met some months earlier. He stayed for dinner. Actually, he stayed for good. In the first audiobook to consider the hidden heart and history of the Netherlands from a modern perspective, the author explores the length and breadth of his adopted homeland and discovers why one of the world's smallest countries is also so significant and so fascinating.

She's a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they're found, and Naira Sharp thinks she knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity's expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.

Leovander Loveage is a master of small magics. He can summon butterflies with a song or turn someone's hair pink by snapping his fingers. Such minor charms don't earn him much admiration from other sorcerers (or his father), but anything more elaborate always blows up in his face. Which is why Leo vowed years ago to never again write powerful magic. That is, until a mix-up involving a forbidden spell binds Leo to obey the commands of his longtime nemesis, Sebastian Grimm. Grimm is Leo's complete opposite - respected, exceptionally talented, and an absolutely insufferable curmudgeon.

Giles Chamberlain returns to a snowbound Cambridge after Christmas spent with his girlfriend. Determined to prove himself to her family, he sets out to discover what became of her missing brother. But when he encounters a sinister figure prowling the college’s rooftops, he suspects last semester’s creature was not the only entity to cross into our world.

He was the sexy, gorgeous-as-hell older stranger with piercing blue eyes fixated on me. Annoyed. The perfect candidate for a holiday fling. You’re hired. It was my final summer of fun before I moved to London to start my trainee contract at Madison Legal, London's most elite law firm. Three of the steamiest nights of my life…until it ended in heartbreak.

We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, deeply compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and even our humanity. In Our Next Reality, two industry veterans provide a data-driven debate on whether the new world we're creating will be a technological utopia or an AI-powered dystopia and gives guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.

When a championship jockey discovers the body of a young woman during a cold morning’s training ride, the local racing community is shocked to its core. Everyone says she was the perfect friend, the perfect daughter and the perfect fiancée. However as Detective Mark Turpin delves into the girl’s fateful last hours, he discovers a past full of lies and mystery. Investigating the truth behind her savage death, Mark uncovers jealousy and ambition within the tiny community, accompanied by a disturbing reluctance to help the police.

When a parish priest is brutally murdered in cold blood, a rural community is left in shock–and fear. New to the Vale of the White Horse, Detective Sergeant Mark Turpin discovers the murder bears the hallmark of a vicious killer who shows no remorse for his victim, and leaves no trace behind. After a second priest is killed, his broken body bearing similar ritualistic abuse, the police are confronted by a horrifying truth–there is a serial killer at large with a disturbing vendetta.

The pharmaceutical industry is broken. A system that was designed to drive innovation and patient care has been relentlessly distorted to drive up profits. Medicines have become nothing more than financial assets. Sick Money argues that the way medicines are developed and paid for is no longer working. In this book, investigative journalist Billy Kenber offers a diagnosis of an industry in crisis and a prescription for how we can fight back.

In November 1974, British MP and former cabinet minister John Stonehouse walked into the sea off a beach in Miami and disappeared, seemingly drowned. Then he was found—on the other side of the world, in Australia—and his extraordinary story began to come to light: a Labour cabinet minister and a devoted family man, also in a long-term affair with his secretary, and a spy for the Czech State Security agency, who had committed fraud and attempted to fake his own death to escape catastrophic business failures.