Showing results by publisher "Zaffre" in All Categories

Whitby, 1845. Amber Ainsley works for the wealthy Greenwoods. But when Amber falls pregnant with Mr Barnaby Greenwood's illegitimate child, he casts her out, leaving her homeless and without an income. Amber flees to Whitby where she stays with her uncle until her child is born. Upon discovering this, Barnaby offers to find a family to raise Amber's daughter, to save her going to the workhouse. Broken-hearted but wanting the best for her child, Amber hands her daughter over.

Seventeen-year-old Jenny is abducted in broad daylight and taken to a dilapidated, isolated house where she is chained and caged along with several other girls. Their captor is unpredictable and as wily as he is cruel: he foils every one of their desperate attempts to escape...and once caught, they rarely survive their punishment. Five years later, Jenny is found dead in a public park, and the police are scrambling to find a lead among the scant evidence. But Detective Joona Linna realises that this murder has an eerie connection to a death that was declared a suicide years before.

The landline rings as Agneta is waving off her grandchildren. Just one word comes out of the receiver: 'Geiger'. For decades, Agneta has always known that this moment would come, but she is shaken. She knows what it means. Retrieving her weapon from its hiding place, she attaches the silencer and creeps up behind her husband before pressing the barrel to his temple. Then she squeezes the trigger and disappears - leaving behind her wallet and keys.

Three glass cabinets appear in London's Trafalgar Square containing a gruesome art installation: the floating corpses of three homeless men. Shock turns to horror when it becomes clear that the bodies are real. The cabinets are traced to @nonymous—an underground artist shrouded in mystery who makes a chilling promise: more will follow. Eighteen years ago, Detective Inspector Grace Archer escaped a notorious serial killer. Now, she and her caustic DS, Harry Quinn, must hunt down another.

Fleetwood Shuttleworth is 17 years old, married and pregnant for the fourth time. But as the mistress at Gawthorpe Hall, she still has no living child, and her husband, Richard, is anxious for an heir. When Fleetwood finds a letter she isn't supposed to read from the doctor who delivered her third stillbirth, she is dealt the crushing blow that she will not survive another pregnancy. Then she crosses paths by chance with Alice Gray, a young midwife. Alice promises to help her give birth to a healthy baby and to prove the physician wrong.

The most anticipated spy thriller of 2020, from the Sunday Times best-selling author of Corpus. Autumn 1941. The war is going badly for Britain and its allies. If Hitler is to be stopped, a new weapon is desperately needed. In Cambridge, professor Tom Wilde is approached by an American intelligence officer who claims to know of such a weapon - one so secret even Hitler himself isn't aware of its existence. If Wilde can smuggle the package out of Germany, the Third Reich will surely fall.

Sweden, 1942—Two old friends meet. They are cousins. One is Prince George, Duke of Kent, brother of the King of England. The other is Prince Philipp von Hessen, a committed Nazi and close friend of Adolf Hitler. Days later, the Prince George is killed in a plane crash in the north of Scotland. The official story is that it was an accident—but not everyone is convinced. There is even a suggestion that the Duke's plane was sabotaged, but with no evidence, Cambridge spy Tom Wilde is sent north to discover the truth . . .

In a great English house, a young woman offers herself to one of the most powerful and influential figures in the land - but this is no ordinary seduction. She plans to ensure his death.... On holiday in France, Professor Tom Wilde discovers his brilliant student Marcus Marfield, who disappeared two years earlier to join the International Brigades in Spain, in the Le Vernet concentration camp in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Wilde secures his release just as German tanks roll into Poland. Meanwhile, a U-boat sinks the liner Athenia in the Atlantic with many casualties....

Eight years ago, James McCready was convicted of killing his partner, Gary Meadows. But McCready has always claimed that the stabbing was a tragic accident and, when fresh evidence comes to light, he wins his appeal for a retrial. Detective Inspector Pat North is assigned to the reinvestigation. But when North discovers that her partner, Detective Superintendent Mike Walker, led the original police inquiry, their fledgling relationship is put to the test - particularly when she starts to suspect that he is covering something up.

Hildur Rúnarsdottir is the only police detective in the isolated Westfjords of Iceland, desperately trying to forget her traumatic past by burying herself in her cases. Once Jakob Johanson, a Finnish police trainee with a knitting hobby, begins to work alongside Hildur to escape his own complicated life, it becomes clear that neither can keep their pasts away for long. But when a local man is found with his throat slit, underneath an avalanche that has buried much of the evidence, Hildur and Jakob must set their own problems aside and unravel the dark secrets and a killer that the fjords hide.

Twenty-five-year-old Kat Bennett has never had a place to call home, and when she moves into the crumbling Shelley House, she thinks it will just be temporary. Seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Darling has lived in Shelley House for longer than anyone can remember, and if you believe the other tenants, she's as cantankerous as they come. When the building faces demolition, sworn enemies Kat and Dorothy become unlikely allies in their quest to save their historic home...and even less likely investigators when they suspect that foul play is coming from inside the house.

When an eccentric widow claims she is being stalked by her former lodger, Detective Jack Warr is the only person who believes her wild claims. Days later, she is found brutally murdered in her home. When the investigation uncovers an international drugs operation on the widow's property, the case grows even more complex. And as the hunt for the widow's lodger hits dead end after dead end, it seems that the prime suspect has vanished without a trace.

Fifteen-year-old Cassie Booth goes missing on her paper round. Then her bloodstained jacket is found in a boathouse belonging to Karl Wilding - but there's little evidence against him. A routine visit by Detective Inspector Pat North to appease persistent complainer Stephen Warrington spirals into something far more sinister. As his behaviour becomes increasingly obsessive, North is caught in a frightening web of deceit and lies that fuels her suspicion that Warrington has been involved in a far more horrific crime.

After Jimmy's shocking departure, Nellie Castle is feeling bereft. And with Rodney being elusive, she's determined to do all she can to help her youngest son Bert get back on his feet following the terrible injuries he sustained in the bombing. Plagued by guilt and nightmares, the last thing Bert wants is to return to the café - being there only makes his guilt over Gladys's death worse. His relationship with nurse Vi is helping somewhat, but when he receives a formal summons to the trial of the woman who tried to kill him, he is plunged back into the depths of despair.

When Nicola's husband, Dominic, retires they decide not to spend their days finding hobbies to fill the time until Countdown is on. Instead, they fulfil their life-long fantasy of buying a country house and filling it with their dearest friends. Reliving their youth and spending their children's inheritance. Joined by seven of their friends they club together to invest in a château in Normandy. Group dinners, fine wine, beautiful scenery - they're living the dream!

Winter 1917. As the First World War enters its most brutal phase, back home in England, everyone is seeking answers to the darkness that has seeped into their lives. At Blackwater Abbey, on an island off the Devon coast, Lord Highmount has arranged a spiritualist gathering to contact his two sons who were lost in the conflict. But as his guests begin to arrive, it gradually becomes clear that each has something they would rather keep hidden. Then, when a storm descends on the island, the guests will find themselves trapped. Soon one of their number will die.

Three years ago, when receptionist Millie Chandler had her heart broken in a very public way, she became a closed book, vowing to keep everything to herself - her feelings, her truths, even her dreams. It's safer that way. There's less chance of her getting hurt. But Millie does have an outlet: her draft emails. She never sends them. Never would. They live in her drafts, where nobody can read them and nobody gets hurt - especially, not her. But after a server outage at work, Millie wakes up on a normal-seeming Wednesday morning to find that all of her emails have been sent. Every. Single. One.

1968. Veronica Moon, a junior photographer for a local newspaper, is frustrated by her (male) colleagues' failure to take her seriously. And then she meets Leonie on the picket line of the Ford factory at Dagenham. So begins a tumultuous, passionate and intoxicating friendship. Leonie is ahead of her time and fighting for women's equality with everything she has. She offers Veronica an exciting, free life at the dawn of a great change. Fifty years later, Leonie is gone, and Veronica leads a reclusive life.

Baby has had it with just about everything. She's fed up with her job and her colleagues, her love life is permanently casual, she's grieving for her dad and if her mother and the aunties don't stop asking her when she's going to settle down and start having babies, she might just lose it. When Baby finds some love letters between her grandfather and someone who is very clearly not Baby's Nana, she needs to know more. She's going to go to India, find out why her family left, find out more about the mysterious woman and find out more about herself.

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it. But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant. DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career.