Showing results by narrator "Simon Prebble" in All Categories

Season Two, Volume One. Four cryptic cases involving murder, mayhem, and mysterious disappearances. Is one mastermind behind them all?

Season Two, Volume Two. Three more catastrophic crimes lead the Baker Street Team to distant shores as they struggle to save Lucy’s mother and defeat a relentless foe once and for all.

Tantor Media presents a collection of some of the most popular Christmas stories read by two award-winning narrators. This special anthology will transport listeners back to the Christmases of their youth, when they first heard these holiday tales

In the 1840s, Charles Dickens wrote five short stories with strong social and moral messages. "The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home", is the third of these stories. Following the home life of John Peerybingle, the story introduces the many people in John's family and life, along with a cricket that acts as the guardian angel of the family. Like its predecessors, this story also contains heavy social and moral implications.

Pop diva, Clarion Calhoun, has packed the house with a celebrity appearance in Bath's Theatre Royal production of I Am a Camera. But within moments of her much-anticipated onstage appearance, she's pulled out of character as she screams and claws at her face. When tainted stage makeup is found to have caused the disfiguring burn, fingers point to her makeup artist. Detective Peter Diamond investigates when the makeup artist is found dead, pushed from a catwalk far above the stage.

On a brisk fall day, a six-year-old boy and his nanny vanish without a trace during a trip to the London Tower. When the boy’s father, Lord Rollings, is summoned to the Tower to receive ransom instructions, he immediately puts Sherlock and Lucy on the case. The clues are scant and the tension is high - every moment that passes could bring the boy closer to danger.

By 1939, Anglo-American journalist John Russell has spent over a decade in Berlin, where his son lives with his mother. He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as World War II approaches, he faces having to leave his son as well as his girlfriend of several years, a beautiful German starlet. When an acquaintance from his old communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets, Russell is reluctant, but he is unable to resist the offer.

Oscar Wilde brings his enormous gifts for astute social observation and sparkling prose to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. This dandy, who remains forever unchanged---petulant, hedonistic, vain, and amoral---while a painting of him ages and grows increasingly hideous with the years, has been horrifying and enchanting readers for more than 100 years.

When world-renowned wine expert Benjamin Cooker's elderly father needs him most, the erudite consultant and his dashing assistant Virgile Lanssien are called away to Burgundy to orchestrate the harvest. More than just picking grapes, the Winemaker Detective must keep a delicate balance between an old-time vintner and his heir as a catastrophic hailstorm endangers some of France's most celebrated wines. Adding insult to injury, the brutal and mysterious murder of a grape picker sends shock waves through the winemaking world.

London, 1899: When a mysterious packet is stolen from a diplomatic courier, Sherlock and Lucy are called upon to recover it before its ominous contents fall into the wrong hands. The Baker Street gang uncovers a dark, tangled web of intrigue and an evil plot that could very well bring all of England to its knees. When a notorious criminal is found dead in the bookstore basement, and the bookseller is arrested for the crime, the danger becomes very real, and very personal. Can Holmes and Lucy find the perilous packet, catch the murderous mastermind, and foil the fiendish plot?

The heirs to one of the oldest Cognac estates in France face a hostile takeover by foreign investors. Renowned wine expert Benjamin Cooker is called in to audit the books. In what he thought was a sleepy provincial town, he is stonewalled, crosses paths with his first love, and stands up to high-level state officials keen on controlling the buyout. Meanwhile irresistible Virgile mingles with the local population until a drowning changes the stakes.

A small town holds fiercely on to its secrets. In the heart of Gascony, a fire ravages the warehouse of one of Armagnac's top estates, killing the master distiller. Wine expert Benjamin Cooker is called in to estimate the value of the losses. But Cooker and his assistant, Virgile, want to know more. How did the old alembic explode? Was it really an accident? Why is the estate owner, Baron de Castayrac, penniless? How legal are his dealings?

One of the most daunting ghost stories to ever be written, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw follows the transformation of Miles (age 10) and Flora (age eight) from well-behaved children to deceitful liars. When a governess comes to their country estate to look after the children, she and Flora are separately visited by a ghost; however Flora denies the experience and Miles claims to never have been visited by one, even when evidence supports an evil plot between the children and the ghosts.

Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law - recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies, but by the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion. The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism.

Disaster strikes the vineyards in Alsace. Vintners are tense and old grudges surface. The Winemaker Detective's reputation is on the line as he must find the cause before the late harvest starts. Winter is in the air in Alsace and local customs are sowing trouble, piquing the curiosity of the famous winemaker from Bordeaux, Benjamin Cooker. While the wine expert and his assistant Virgile settle into their hotel in the old city of Colmar, distinguished vineyards are attacked. Is it revenge?

A business magnate calls on wine expert Benjamin Cooker to kick-start his new wine business in Beaujolais, sparking bitter rivalries. Can the Winemaker Detective and his assistant keep calculating real estate agents, taciturn winegrowers, dubious wine merchants, and suspicious deaths from delaying delivery of the world-famous Beaujolais Nouveau?

The year is 548, and Empress Theodora is dead of disease. Such is the belief of everyone in Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire - everyone except Emperor Justinian, who orders John, his Lord Chamberlain, to find her murderer or suffer the consequences. There is no sign of foul play, but many of the aristocrats at the imperial court had good reason to want Theodora dead.

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease...yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question - or the actual risks of contagion - but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.

In the months before 9/11, former army officer Anthony Taverner is leading a quiet life in the English countryside. But his recruitment for a dangerous mission to Afghanistan by MI6 shatters his fragile peace and plunges him into the kaleidoscopic world of spying. Under the expert guidance of an old-school hero and veteran of the elite British Special Air Service, Taverner prepares to enter Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to destroy a cache of the CIA's precious Stinger missiles....

Three compelling Sherlock Holmes mysteries in one book, including "The Game of Cat and Mouse": "The interior was dark, and neither of us searched for a lamp or switch. There came a ticking of some clock or another. And the sound of a dripping faucet somewhere in the house was like a hammer to an anvil. Our breaths were loud, but my heart sounded louder to me...."