Showing results by narrator "Alex Lee" in All Categories

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. In Simply Tolstoy, Professor Donna Tussing Orwin traces the author’s profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works.

Tommy and Evelyn Christie are looking forward to a quiet Christmas holiday at the home of Hugh Norton-Cavendish, the 9th Earl of Clifford, who recently married Tommy's cousin, Elise. However, the suspicious death of Albert Lewis, a businessman hoping to buy land from Hugh, means the Christmas festivities are quickly over. Tommy is distracted by his sister's new relationship with a man he distrusts. Evelyn is busy with her pack of dogs, brought for the traditional Boxing Day shoot.

One night in Montreal, an ageless man hires a young female translator to help settle mysterious debts with an array of desperate characters.

Rachel thinks she is living the dream. Taking a cruise around Australia and New Zealand as a guest lecturer and meeting up again with her best friend, cruise ship nurse, Sarah. The scene is set for the holiday of a lifetime! Rachel Prince is drawn to investigate when the leader of a bucket list tour party is discovered in the library on the first day of her antipodean cruise. Can this seemingly harmless group of elderly people have a killer among them?

Cruise ship sleuth Rachel Prince just wants to spend New Year's Eve with her husband and the in-laws. But when she gets a call from the Coral Queen's chief of security, Jack Waverley, she drops everything and flies to Italy. There, she parts from her husband and joins her favorite ship for a winter Mediterranean and Adriatic voyage. With Waverley threatening to lose control and a health and safety chief on the warpath, it's hard to know what's coming next. When Rachel's new boss is found dead, it appears the saboteur has upped the ante.

Convinced there won't be any murders on this cruise, the incorrigible Lady Marjorie books the two of them on an event involving a series of murder mystery dinner parties hosted by Murder Mystery Creations. All is not what it seems within the mismatched cast nor within the group of guests attempting to solve an imaginary crime. When a member of the cast winds up dead, Rachel and Marjorie join forces once again to track down a cunning murderer who seems intent on removing anyone who stands in their way.

When Rachel Prince cruises. It's no honeymoon! Rachel's dream honeymoon is disrupted when Sarah's eccentric cousin is found dead. With wedding plans up and down, Rachel and Carlos have finally managed to tie the knot and head off on a Mediterranean cruise. Their honeymoon spirals out of control when murder interrupts marital bliss, and Carlos receives a mysterious phone call from an old flame.

Rachel's got a lot on her mind when she joins the luxurious Coral Queen for the Indian leg of its world voyage. She's delighted to meet up with newlyweds, Sarah and Jason, who have rejoined the ship to work, but something is troubling the two of them.

The Velveteen Daughter reveals for the first time the true story of two remarkable women: Margery Williams Bianco, the author of one of the most beloved children's books of all time, The Velveteen Rabbit, and her daughter Pamela, a world-renowned child prodigy artist whose fame at one time greatly eclipses her mother's. But celebrity at such an early age exacts a great toll. Pamela's dreams elude her as she struggles with severe depressions, an overbearing father, an obsessive love affair, and a spectacularly misguided marriage. Throughout, her life raft is her mother.

Rachel Prince once again joins the Coral Queen for the holiday of a lifetime with her octogenarian friend Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe and her parents. One day into the voyage and a nun who is part of an exclusive religious party collapses. It's not long before the death is seen as suspicious. The chief of security, Jack Waverley, is flummoxed by the case and asks Rachel to assist. All is not what it seems with this religious order and the woman's dying words are a cause for concern.

Rachel Jacobi-Prince and Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe are delighted to be invited to dine at the captain’s table. A pleasant dinner, shared with Marjorie's son and troublesome daughter-in-law, becomes less palatable when the guest of honour goes missing.

Teresa’s heart stops when she enters her daughter’s bedroom to find that her sweet, trusting little girl is gone. Teresa can’t bear to think who would snatch a terrified three-year-old from her mother in the middle of the night, but all the signs point to someone close to home. Hasn’t Jessica’s stepfather been acting a little oddly? Or is it, as Teresa is beginning to fear, something to do with Angie, her daughter’s babysitter who lives next door...?

Endless years of a lonely, childless spinster’s life stretching ahead, Victoria Kavanagh finds an abandoned baby. She knows it’s the answer to her prayers. Or is it? Has she stolen him in a moment of madness? She’s come close to it before. Desperate to keep him, she creates a past of her own design and moves to Faredene, but is her new life far enough away from the past she’s trying to escape? What a framework on which to build - one of lies and deceit.

Henry VIII is in conflict with the Pope and the country is divided. A contingent of people in the north embark upon the Pilgrimage of Grace, to compel their monarch to bring him back into the fold. But the unyielding Henry sends an army to quell the uprising.

It is 1356, seven years since the Black Death ravaged Meonbridge, turning society upside down. Margaret, Lady de Bohun, is horrified when her husband lies about their grandson Dickon’s entitlement to inherit Meonbridge. She knows that Richard lied for the very best of reasons–to safeguard his family and its future–but lying is a sin. Yet she has no option but to maintain her husband’s falsehood....

In Simply Eliot, Joseph Maddrey plumbs the emotional and intellectual life of the man whom critic Edmund Wilson called "one of our only authentic poets". He chronicles Eliot's attempts to create a coherent worldview, and explores how his religious conversion in 1927 led to a spiritual rebirth that allowed him to produce his ultimate poetic statement.

Beth desperately needs some peace, but what she finds is murder...and she finds it a bit too close to home. Accompanied by her cat, Simon, and with her passion for horticulture, Beth works to create an incredible 18th-century British kitchen garden. The garden produces tomatoes, broccoli, greens, honey, and eggs, but food is not the only thing the garden yields. Death comes to Withersby's garden when Beth least expects it. Beth is the obvious suspect. But she knows the truth.

Each night, after dark, men flock to Bankside seeking girls of easy virtue, prostitutes known as the Winchester Geese. Joanie Toogood has worked the streets of Southwark since childhood, but her path is changed forever by an encounter with Francis Wareham, a spy for the King’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell. Meanwhile, across the river, at the glittering court of Henry VIII, Wareham also sets his cap at Evelyn and Isabella Bourne, members of the Queen’s household and the girls, along with Joanie, are drawn into intrigue and the shadow of the executioner’s blade.

A penniless young widow with an indomitable spirit. A wealthy viscount with an unsavory reputation. London, 1815: After her husband's untimely death, Letty Burton comes up from the country with her domineering mother-in-law. Hiding a past she wishes to forget and facing an uncertain future, all she wants is to navigate London Society as a silent companion. A chance meeting with London's most eligible bachelor sets in motion a series of events that will bring her quiet life under the unfriendly scrutiny of the ton. With the net of scandal, debts, and rivals closing in, will she let her dark past dictate her life forever? Will she learn to trust again? And most importantly, will she allow herself to love? The Widow's Redeemer was a finalist in the 2012 RONE Awards (Reward of Novel Excellence) hosted by InD'Tale Magazine.

As Henry VIII’s second queen dies on the scaffold, the embittered King strikes out, and unprecedented change sweeps across the country. The bells of the great abbeys fall silent, the church and the very foundation of the realm begins to crack. Determined to preserve their way of life, novitiate nuns Margery and Grace join a pilgrimage thirty thousand strong to lead the king back to grace.