Showing results by narrator "Patience Tomlinson" in All Categories

An unidentified woman’s body is found in a remote garden in Kent. With the owners not in residence, the only people with legitimate access are the caretaker, Johnny, and landscape gardeners Adam Sarjeant and his employer, Mog. Afraid of her son falling under suspicion, Libby Sarjeant, with her friend Fran, are determined to find the murderer, with or without the assistance of the police in the person of Chief Detective Inspector Ian Connell.

It's 1943 and the country is at war. An unlikely group of land girls are finding out about life, love and loss, forming surprising friendships along the way. When Alice Todd's husband runs off with another woman, she is forced to find a means to provide for herself and her young son. Accepting a position as a hostel warden at an old Devonshire farmhouse, Alice finds herself looking after ten volunteer land girls. The job is not as easy as it first seems.

Norfolk, 1939. When the residents of Great Plumstead, a small and charming community in Norfolk, offer to open their homes to evacuees from London, they're expecting to care for children. So when a train carrying expectant mothers pulls into the station, the town must come together to accommodate their unexpected new arrivals....

Former cook Hettie Brown hears some shocking news, making her question her new life at Rookery House. Expectant mother, Gloria Jessop, is having doubts about her new evacuated life in the village. She's missing her family, and she's tempted to return to London. But is that the right thing to do? Hettie and Gloria decide to take action and quickly hatch a plan. Can they support each other, celebrate Christmas, and bring the whole village together in their time of need?

The deliciously twisty twenty-fifth novel in the much-loved Libby Sarjeant audiobook series by Lesley Cookman.

Ellie and her new husband Thomas are called to deal with Ursula, a young student who has staged a sit-in at church. Ursula challenges Ellie to solve three mysteries: a broken engagement, her friend Mia's disappearance, and a murder. As she investigates, Ellie begins to suspect that there is more to these events. Soon she finds her own friends and family targeted as a powerful group hunts her down.

Thea welcomes her best friend, Violet Steele, to Rookery House. Violet has been in charge of an ambulance station in London's East End during the Blitz, and is in need of a holiday. Will a week in the countryside give her the rest she deserves? VAD nurse Evie Jones receives unwelcome news that stirs up her past and forces her to make an uncomfortable decision. Though she has a surprise when her friend Ned Blythe returns to start a new job in the hospital gardens. Can Evie let go of the past and give her future happiness a chance?

The Tudor era encompasses some of the greatest changes in our history. But while we know about the historical dramas of the times, what was life really like for a commoner? To answer this question, the renowned 'method historian' Ruth Goodman has slept, washed and cooked as the Tudors did. She is your expert guide to this fascinating era, drawing on years of practical historical study to show how our ancestors coped with everyday life, from how they slept to how they courted.

P. D. James brings a lifetime of reading and writing crime fiction to bear on this personal history of the genre, from the birth of the detective story, through Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, to the golden age of crime and the rise of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. There is a chapter on great American crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, and P. D. James also discusses many of her favourite detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Kurt Wallander.

Ten years ago, a missing person story causes a furore in Kent - and the national media. A beautiful young woman with a promising career as a singer walks home alone from a party and is never seen again. There is no evidence, forensic or otherwise, and no-one is ever arrested. A decade later Libby Sarjeant is talked into inspecting a derelict hotel in her home village of Steeple Martin. The body of a young boy is discovered - but is it anything to do with the mysterious disappearance from more than 10 years ago?

In Paris, January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of the German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in friendship and shared experience.

Faye is 39 and single. She's terrified she may never have the one thing she always wanted: a child of her own. Then she discovers a co-parenting app: Acorns. For men and women who want to have a baby, but don't want to do it alone. When she meets Louis through it, it feels as though the fates have aligned.

Jane Fortune causes a stir when she arrives in the small community of Dingleford. She has bought an old cottage and plans to open a tearoom. Old friends Charles Weatherby and Harold Prestcott both fall for the newcomer, but her behaviour seems to vary wildly – she encourages first one then the other and at other times barely recognises them. Is there more to the fair Miss Fortune than meets the eye?

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile him to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely.

1916. Bella is working as a Voluntary Aid driving ambulances in England when she gets engaged to Philip, on leave from fighting in France. His family strongly disapprove of her, but the two of them are happy together. Georgie, Philip's sister, is in trouble, having broken her engagement and fled from her bullying family. Who can she turn to for help when she needs it most? When the worst happens, Bella must manage on her own, though there are shocks and dangers ahead that she did not foresee.

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules is an incredibly quirky, humorous, and warm-hearted story about growing old disgracefully - and breaking all the rules along the way! 79-year-old Martha Andersson dreams of escaping her care home and robbing a bank. She has no intention of spending the rest of her days in an armchair and is determined to fund her way to a much more exciting lifestyle. Along with her four oldest friends - otherwise known as the League of Pensioners - Martha decides to rebel against all of the rules imposed upon them.

For Eveleen Hardcastle life gets no better than growing up on Pear Tree Farm in the Lincolnshire countryside. Her family works hard for the Dunsmore estate and Eveleen finds it impossible to resist the charms of their employer's son, Stephen Dunsmore. But Jimmy, ever quick to antagonize, ensures that his sister's clandestine trysts do not remain so for long. Mary Hardcastle reacts to the news of her daughter's affair with a shocking ferocity, which seems to be borm more of bitterness than maternal protectiveness.

Shortly before Bel's marriage to Ellis Brownlee, her friend, Louise Armstrong, goes house hunting for them and discovers a charming but neglected old stone cottage in the Cotswolds. Bel adores the house, called Fletchers End. Ellis buys the place from the absentee-owner, Lieutenant Commander Lestrange, and, after a picture-book wedding, the happy couple move in. As she embarks on her new life as a devoted wife, Bel loyally guides Louise through her own romantic tribulations.

Armistice Day, London, 1918. Fiercely independent Georgie is tired of being told what's best for her by men. When she defies her father's wishes by going out into the peace festivities, she tries to help a woman being attacked and encounters Patrick, a gallant wounded ex-soldier looking for a new calling now that the fighting is done. But the war isn't over for everybody. Enemy forces have infiltrated the bureau and sent her father into hiding. And they are coming for her, too. Georgie knows there's only one place where she'll be safe: Honeyfield.

Libby Sarjeant is deep into rehearsals for the annual pantomime when a body is found in a doorway two weeks before Christmas - and Libby and her friend Fran are called into action once again, when their investigation leads them to a local brewery and the sale of many of its pubs. With the help of a team of local publicans, can Libby and Fran unravel the case before it's too late?