Showing results by narrator "Davina Porter" in All Categories

Life is finally looking up for the poor relations. The Prince of Wales’ coat of arms gleams over the hotel entrance. All but one of the rooms are filled by the open-handed Prince Hugo and his entourage. They have finally reached a position comfortable enough to allow them to consider offers to buy the hotel. The poor relations’ hard-earned success, however, is in stark contrast to the plight of their latest guest, Lady Jane Fremney. The slight, beautiful youngest daughter of the Earl of Durby has been cast out of her family for refusing to marry the man her father has chosen.

In Edinburgh, rumors and gossip abound. But Isabel well knows that such things can't be taken at face value. Still, the latest whispers hint at mysterious goings-on, and who but Isabel can be trusted to get to the bottom of them? At the same time, she must deal with the demands of her two small children, her husband, and her rather tempestuous niece, Cat, whose latest romantic entanglement comes - to no one's surprise - with complications. Still, even with so much going on, Isabel, through the application of good sense, logic, and ethics, will, as ever, triumph.

Reunited after their harrowing time spent apart during World War II, Allison and Logan have successfully patched their marriage and discovered a new level of commitment to one another. But when Lady Joanna dies in 1971, changes begin to reshape the lives of the Stonewycke descendants.

Hailed as Charlotte Brontë’s “finest novel” by Virginia Woolf, Villette is the timeless semi-autobiographical tale of Lucy Snowe. Left with no family and no money, Lucy goes against her own timid nature and travels to the small city of Villette, France, where she becomes a school teacher in Madame Beck’s school for girls. During her stay, she falls in love—twice—and discovers an independent, inner strength rarely seen in women of her time.

“Action, drama, desire, revenge: Shadow Music includes all the necessary ingredients for romantics to plunge into the moors, mountains and magical myth of medieval Scotland.”—The Roanoke Times Prized for her exquisite beauty, Princess Gabrielle of St. Biel, the daughter of one of...

The fifth novel in New York Times best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith's beloved Isabel Dalhousie series has the ethical problem solver from Edinburgh finding comforts in unlikely places.

Still struggling to define the nature of their new marriage, Sebastian and Hero find themselves occasionally working at cross-purposes as their investigation uncovers dark secrets at the heart of the Tennyson family and an enigmatic young French lieutenant who is concealing mysteries of his own.

It's October 1814. London suddenly finds itself in the grip of a series of heinous murders eerily similar to the Ratcliffe Highway murders of three years before. In 1811, two entire families were viciously murdered in their homes. A suspect - a young seaman named John Williams - was arrested. But before he could be brought to trial, Williams hanged himself in his cell. The murders ceased. But when the lead investigator is killed in the same brutal way three years later and others possibly connected to the original case meet violent ends, the city is paralyzed with terror once more.

Charlotte Pitt's sister, Emily, has been accused of murdering her wayward but wealthy husband. Now Charlotte and police inspector Thomas Pitt must breach a formidable uppercrust barrier to prove Emily's innocence. Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries are rich and suspenseful journeys into a world filled with impeccable manners and intrigue.

Ten people gather together for an elegant London dinner party. By the end of the party, only nine are alive. Sometime after dinner, General Thaddeus Carlyon is brutally murdered in the hallway. Who had the strength - and motive - to murder the distinguished military hero? Nurse Latterly and Inspector Monk find the answers in a nightmarish legacy of evil.

In this latest installment of Alexander McCall Smith's ever-delightful and perennially best-selling series, amateur sleuth and philosopher Isabel Dalhousie is called upon to help when a matchmaker begins to question her latest match. Rosemary is something of a matchmaker and has brought together a cosmetic surgeon and a successful banker at her most recent dinner party. But new information comes to light about the cosmetic surgeon that causes Rosemary to doubt the auspiciousness of the match.

Rupert, the young Earl of Westerholme, returns home from the war - and Anna, a housemaid, falls hopelessly in love with him. But they can never be together - Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel. And anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks.

Revered mystery writer Josephine Tey is traveling from Scotland to London for the final week of her play Richard of Bordeaux, the surprise hit of the season, with pacifist themes that resonate in a world still haunted by war. But joy turns to horror when her arrival coincides with the murder of a young woman she had befriended on the train ride - and Tey is plunged into a mystery as puzzling as any in her own works.

Now a television miniseries, as seen on Masterpiece on PBS Set in seventeenth century Amsterdam—a city ruled by glittering wealth and oppressive religion—a masterful debut steeped in atmosphere and shimmering with mystery, in the tradition of Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, and Sarah Dunant...

Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be the prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? And Charlie's death was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women. Now Chief Inspector Wexford and his assistant join forces with the groom to track down a killer....

From deep in the heart of his 18th century English manor, millionaire Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk writes mystery novels and torments his four spoiled children with threats of disinheritance. Gathering them all together for a family dinner, he announces his latest blow - a secret elopement. Within hours, eldest son and appointed heir Ruthven is found cleaved to death by a medieval mace. And soon Sir Adrian himself is found slumped over his writing desk - an ornate knife thrust into his heart.

In this delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smith's best-selling new detective series, the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, gets caught up in an affair of the heart, this one a transplant.

Seventeen-year-old Maggie Duncan is torn between her obligations as a dutiful daughter and her hatred of her father's cruel pursuit of money and power. But on the boundary between childhood and womanhood, Maggie discovers it is not her father who stands in the way of her happiness - it is her own tightly held bitterness. Drawn to a man quietly struggling to overcome his past, Maggie must learn to let go of hatred and embrace divine love and forgiveness

Lady Rose Summer, the wayward Edwardian debutante who keeps getting mixed up in disreputable adventures, would swear she is not a jealous woman. After all, she knows her engagement to private detective Captain Harry Cathcart is only a ploy to keep her parents from shipping her off to India. But then Harry's latest client, Dolores Duval--a vision of curves with a seductive French accent--starts appearing everywhere at his side.

Two murders, one on the heels of the other, point in the direction of Thomas Lynley's younger brother Peter - a cocaine addict who ruins Thomas' engagement party, then disappears on the evening of the second murder.