Showing results by narrator "Dan Calley" in All Categories

It should've been a dream. A new life on the coast, running a beautiful country hotel with my husband. It should have been everything I'd ever wanted. Worth every scrap of investment. A hotel business we'd sunken every single penny we owned into, only to find out there was a big chain rival opening just a stone's throw away. Slowly, day by day, the dream became a nightmare. Bills. So many bills. Sleepless nights, tossing and turning. No way out in sight. Until there was him. The man at the bar. The man with a proposition we should never have considered in a thousand years.

Ripped from a forgotten homeland as a child, Tisaanah learned how to survive with nothing but a sharp wit and a touch of magic. But the night she tries to buy her freedom, she barely escapes with her life. Desperate to save the best friend she left behind, Tisaanah journeys to the Orders, the most powerful organizations of magic Wielders in the world. But to join their ranks, she must complete an apprenticeship with Maxantarius Farlione, a handsome and reclusive fire wielder who despises the Orders.

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants. Behind the velvet curtains of horse-drawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. Brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

A man’s body washes up on a beach on the North Yorkshire coast with a single gunshot wound to the chest. The only clue to the victim’s identity is a ring engraved with two names. DCI Tom Raven is back in his hometown of Scarborough for the first time in over 30 years. When offered the chance to lead the murder investigation, he takes it. Raven quickly discovers that the prime suspect is his once-teenage friend, now a wealthy but shady businessman. He finds an ally in Detective Sergeant Becca Shawcross, but not everyone in the team is on his side.

Sam Earnshaw’s recovery from a year-long coma should be an occasion for celebration. Instead, he reveals that the hit and run incident that left him close to death was no accident. Someone deliberately pushed him into the path of a speeding vehicle. As DCI Tom Raven leads the investigation into the attempted murder, he soon uncovers a web of dark secrets and lies. The attempt on Sam’s life is not the first time a killer has struck.

I’ve been alive for millennia and have yet to meet my fated mate. It’s not something I’ve ever cared about; my heart already belongs to another. Someone I can’t have. Someone who doesn’t want me. Now I know we’ll never be together. Unlike me, he’s found his fated mates. Two of them. That’s fine. As leader of the Seraphim, Heaven’s most elite unit of angels, I don’t have time for love.

Tisaanah bargained away her own freedom to save those she left behind in slavery. Now, bound by her blood pact, she must fight the Orders' war—and Max is determined to protect her at all costs. But when a betrayal tears apart Ara, Max and Tisaanah are pushed into an even bloodier conflict. Tisaanah must gamble with Reshaye's power to claim an impossible victory. And Max, forced into leadership, must confront everything he hoped to forget: his past, and his own mysterious magic. All the while, darker forces loom—far darker, even, than the Orders' secrets.

When your eyes land on a complete stranger on the train, and the world around you stops. When the stranger says hello, and your heart stops, too. When the universe answers your prayers and he's there, next day, on the train. A man so powerful—brooding with darkness and secrets. I knew there was going to be more. I wanted more. When the stranger is reading one of your favorite novels, and you're reading one of his. When you think the universe can't be any kinder, but it truly delivers the jackpot of all jackpots and two opposite worlds collide, as though it was meant to be.

I've never been good at doing the right thing. A series of bad choices have left my life in tatters. Everyone is telling me to move on, but how can I? What I did was unforgivable, even if some believe otherwise. My whole world imploded the night I left a human dying on a classroom floor. I don't deserve anything good in my life, I know that. But I'm desperate for peace. Just a few moments where I can escape from everything I've done. When Toby offers me a solution that promises just that, I jump at it. I never imagined having a Dom but with Toby in that role?

Across an empty laneway in Paris, through my hotel window, he saw me first. I stopped undressing . . . but only for a moment. The next night, he was waiting for me. He sat there in his expensive suit and watched. No participation. My only acknowledgement was the look of lust in his eyes. It continued until the night before I left, when I found a card under my door. No words. Just a number. So, I texted him. I'd never done anything like it before. It felt so dirty and wrong, but at the same time, I felt alive.

After leaving the SAS, going into personal security seemed like the next logical step. Having been briefed on my client, the drummer for the rock band Caffeine Daydreams, I believed I'd be guarding some spoiled kid with more money than sense. But as I get to know Arlo, I realize nothing could be further from the truth.

Scarborough Castle, high on the headland, is the picturesque backdrop for an English Civil War re-enactment. But the day takes a sinister turn when the town’s MP is shot and killed in broad daylight. DCI Tom Raven is quickly on the scene, but the investigation is soon commandeered by a senior officer from Counter Terrorism, leaving Raven sidelined. When cryptic letters are received, taunting the police, it becomes clear that democracy itself may be the target.

When flash floods unearth a human skeleton at a local beauty spot, DCI Tom Raven is called to investigate. Who is the dead man, and how did he end up there? Help is on hand from forensic anthropologist Dr Chandice Jones who enjoys the challenge of working with old bones. But is Raven one challenge too many for her?

One February afternoon, Detective Ray Flowers' life is blown apart by a petrol bomb attack. No one can tell him who did it. Or why. Anchorless and alone, he moves to his aunt's country cottage. What he needs is perspective. Instead, he is tormented by visions of Kitty Hallam, a troubled young woman accused of witchcraft. Back in 1643. Is she a figment of Flowers' imagination or something more? Whatever the truth, Flowers can't help but be drawn into Kitty's world, sensing their stories are intertwined somehow.

A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Blayn is a vicious, dirty fighter in the arena. Picked for his ability to maim and destroy, he's the one gladiator you never bet against. However, his feral nature has got him into trouble too often, and someone has to get him over his fear of being touched by anything other than a sword, claw or tooth. That someone is me. Former cleaner in a pleasure house here on Trefa, now expected to help this dangerous gladiator become greater than ever, or else he'll lose everything, including his life.

John Taylor works in the Nightside - the gaudy, neon noir, secret heart of London, where it's always three in the morning, where gods and monsters make deals and seek pleasures they won't find anywhere else. He has a gift for finding things. And sometimes what he's hired to locate can be very, very dangerous indeed.

DCI Tom Raven’s hopes for a few quiet days with his daughter, Hannah, are shattered when a shocking murder plunges him into a macabre mystery in the nearby coastal town of Whitby. In the hallowed grounds of the ruined abbey, a man lies lifeless: drained of blood and marked by the symbol of a dragon.

Opposites attract. The outlaw biker and the accountant. Straightlaced vs straight to hell. Or heaven, depending on how you look at it. And you can look at it any way you like, doesn't mean it's true. Either way, falling for snarky Alexei Ivanov is the lightbulb moment I've been waiting for my whole damn life. Or at least since my head got turned by someone else. A man I call brother, but he's so much more than that.

The name's John Taylor. I work the garish streets of the Nightside - the hidden heart of London where it's always three a.m., where inhuman creatures and otherworldly gods walk side by side in the endless darkness of the soul. I have a talent for finding things. People...property...no problem. But now I'm after something different. A local diva called the Nightingale has cut herself off from her family and friends, and I've been hired to find out the reason. I'm also wondering why her suicide-prone fans think she has a voice to die for. Literally.