Showing results by narrator "Thomas Judd" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families let alone raise them. But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality tv show.

London. Early morning, June 2019: on the foreshore of the river Thames, a bag of bones is discovered. Human bones. DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene and quickly sends the bag for forensic examination. The bones are those of a young woman, killed by a blow to the head many years ago. Also inside the bag is a trail of clues, in particular the seeds of a rare tree which lead DCI Owusu back to a mansion in Chelsea where three people lay dead in a kitchen. Four deaths. An unsolved mystery. A family whose secrets can't stay buried for ever.

A dramatic new departure for international best-selling author Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals takes us into the heart of the Elizabethan era. Fools and Mortals follows the young Richard Shakespeare, an actor struggling to make his way in a company dominated by his estranged older brother, William. As the growth of theatre blooms, their rivalry - and that of the playhouses, playwrights and actors vying for acclaim and glory - propels a high-stakes story of conflict and betrayal.

When a routine autopsy on what looked like a straightforward hit-and-run leads the LA Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Carolyn Hove, to discover some puzzling inconsistencies, she calls in Detective Robert Hunter of the LAPD Ultra Violent Crimes Unit. Not only did Dr Hove discover that the death wasn’t caused by a hit-and-run, but she also found indications that the victim had been severely tortured prior to death.

London. A snowy December, 1888. Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend - until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mlle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star, writes that her illegitimate son by an English lord has disappeared, and she has been attacked in the streets of Montmartre.

Karin Müller of the German Democratic Republic's People's Police is called to a factory in the east of the country. A man has been murdered - bound and trapped as a fire burned nearby, slowly suffocating him. Could his murderer simply be someone with a grudge against the factory's nationalisation, as Müller's Stasi colleagues insist? Why too is her deputy Werner Tilsner behaving so strangely? As more victims surface, it becomes clear that there is a cold-blooded killer out there taking their revenge.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in a derelict cottage in the middle of Los Angeles National Forest, Homicide Detective Robert Hunter finds himself entering a horrific and recurring nightmare. Naked, strung from two wooden posts, the victim was sadistically tortured before meeting an excruciatingly painful death. All the skin has been ripped from her face - while she was still alive.

After a tough week, Tanya Kaitlin is looking forward to a relaxing night in, but as she steps out of her shower, she hears her phone ring. The video call request comes from her best friend, Karen Ward. Tanya takes the call, and the nightmare begins. Karen is gagged and bound to a chair in her own living room. If Tanya disconnects from the call, if she looks away from the camera, he will come after her next, the deep, raspy, demonic voice at the other end of the line promises her.

Paul Henderson leads a normal life. A deputy headteacher at a good school, a loving relationship with girlfriend Jenna and a baby on the way. Everything seems perfect. Until Paul receives a message from his ex-fiancé, Nicole. Beautiful, ambitious and fierce, Nicole is everything Jenna is not. Now it seems Nicole is back, and she has a score to settle. But Paul can’t understand how Nicole is back. Because he’s pretty sure he killed her with his own bare hands. Which means someone else knows the truth about what happened that night. And they’ll stop at nothing to make Paul pay.

'She throws her head back and pushes her chest forward and lets go a huge blast right into the centre of his body. The rivulets and streams of red scarring run across his chest and up around his throat. She'd put her hand on his heart and stopped him dead.' Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death.

Four novella-length stories written to illuminate Lindsey Davis's unparalleled output of the last 30 years, with an introduction written and narrated by the author.

On honeymoon in Bali, you hit it off with another newlywed couple and celebrate your last night at a fancy cliff-side restaurant. No one predicted the evening would end with a dead body. But it was an accident, right? A tragic accident. The honeymoon may be over but it soon becomes clear that there's another side to this story...and your life depends on uncovering it. Many marriages can survive anything – but when it starts on a lie is it really 'til death do us part?

When those harrowing words ring out during a children’s entertainment in Washington on the evening of April 14, 1865, a quick-thinking young chemist from England named Johnnie Holmes grabs the 12-year-old son of the dying president, races the boy to safety, and soon finds himself enlisted in the most infamous manhunt in history.

In the shadow of Mount Hood in the US Pacific Northwest, 16-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister, Sophie. The girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams. From out of nowhere, their father sweeps them up and drops them through a trapdoor into a storm cellar. But the noise only gets worse....

‘Do you believe the Devil exists, Detective?’ the officer at the end of the line asks. ‘Because if you don’t...I’m sure you will once you get here.’ This is how Robert Hunter is called to one of the most vicious crime scenes he has ever attended. The disturbing nature of the murder is heightened when the autopsy reveals a poem, left by the killer, inside the body of their victim. When another murder occurs, the methods and signature of each death differ so greatly that forensics fail to link the two crimes.

A student nurse has the shock of her life when she discovers her patient, prosecutor Derek Nicholson, brutally murdered in his bed. The act seems senseless - Nicholson was terminally ill, with only weeks to live. But what most shocks Detective Robert Hunter of the Los Angeles Robbery Homicide Division is the calling card the killer left behind.

Winning stories from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams Hodder- Guardian competition. The number one best-selling writer Stephen King presents six gripping and chilling stories in this captivating anthology: 'Wild Swimming' by Elodie Harper. 'Eau-de-Eric' by Manuela Saragosa. 'The Spots' by Paul Bassett Davies. 'The Unpicking' by Michael Button. 'La Mort de L'amant' by Stuart Johnstone. 'The Bear Trap' by Neil Hudson.

'Thirty-seven years in the force, and if I was allowed to choose just one thing to erase from my mind, what's inside that room would be it.' That's what a LAPD Lieutenant tells Detectives Hunter and Garcia of the Ultra Violent Crimes Unit as they arrive at one of the most shocking crime scenes they have ever attended. In a completely unexpected turn of events, the detectives find themselves joining forces with the FBI to track down a serial killer whose hunting ground sees no borders, a psychopath who loves what he does.

When an unidentified female body is discovered laid out on a slab in an abandoned butcher's shop, the cause of death is unclear. Her body bares no marks - except for the fact that her lips have been carefully stitched shut. It is only when the full autopsy gets underway at the Los Angeles County morgue that the pathologist will reveal the true horror of the situation.

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem.