Showing results by narrator "Peter Hosking" in All Categories

Broken by his last case, homicide detective Joe Cashin has fled the city and returned to his hometown to run its one-man police station while his wounds heal and the nightmares fade. He lives a quiet life with his two dogs in the tumbledown wreck his family home has become. It's a peaceful existence - ideal for the rehabilitating man. But his recovery is rudely interrupted by a brutal attack on Charles Bourgoyne, a prominent member of the local community.

An Italian general is found dead in his apartment. Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames. Is it suicide or murder? Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation that leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general’s former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful onetime spy.

A true insider's story of the backpacker murders from the detective who led the team that arrested Ivan Milat. Milat - the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers. The backpackers - the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo - a place that became synonymous with pure evil. It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.

The police never notice the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an abandoned car. A detail that tells Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station is anything but accidental. Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? Bony feels the answers lie somewhere in the sands of Windee.

Peter Carey's brilliant, hilarious, Booker Prize-short-listed Illywhacker is the novel that first brought him to international attention. Herbert Badgery is vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch. He might very well be the embodiment of Australia's national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history.

Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties.

Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past.

In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the enigmatic life and mysterious death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of sainthood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent by the Vatican to investigate. As he tries to untangle the web of facts, rumours and outright lies that surround Nerone, we are reminded how the power of goodness ultimately prevails over despair.

Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn’t usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple’s suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law, Greg, has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places - and low. Harry can’t get officially involved in Greg’s murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'.

Mr. Jelly's Business is one of hte finest of Arthur Upfield's many distinguished stories about the career of Detective-Inspector Napoleon ("Bony") Bonaparte. It takes Bony to the West Australian town of Burracoppin to investigate the disappearance of George Loftus, whose car was found wrecked near the longest fence in the world, the 1,500 mile Rabbit Fence. He meets Loftus's wife, who is anything but grief-stricken; Loftus's hired man, singularly reticent about his own past history; and many of Burracoppin's gossips.

Paul Desmond admires his close friend George Harlequin for his impeccable European breeding. Head of a prestigious Swiss bank, Harlequin belongs to a vanishing class of gentlemen whose handshake is their bond. Then their gilded world is blown apart. A computer printout identifies the Harlequin et Cie bank as the target of a gigantic takeover. The mastermind is Basil Yanko, a ruthless financial genius whose instruments are fraud, blackmail and terror. As the conflict moves from Zurich to London, New York and Mexico, Harlequin must become a 'villain by necessity'.

The incomparable Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is back - and now he must solve one of his most baffling cases. When Bony sets out to investigate two bizarre murders at Wirragatta Station, deep in the Australian Outback, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent is now cold, and any surviving clues have been confused by a bumbling policeman. As Bony gets closer to the trail, the mysterious murderer sets out to stop him. Can Bony stop the killer first?

The aborigines, who knew how many eagles flew over their inland desert, must have known who put the dead white man into Lucifer's Couch. But no one in Hall's Creek, white or black, reported seeing the stranger - and there were no tracks around the meteor crater. Was the murder done by whites or blacks or by both in collusion? Bony listened to the ancient tribal legends and found truth nobody wanted to believe.

This experienced author describes the personality of the first Czech president within the context of 20th-century history. He artfully combines historical occurrences with personal accounts, describing the nature of a totalitarian society and the unwavering pursuit of truth by individuals. Young listeners will acquire a lucid understanding of figures like Masaryk and Hitler, the aftermath of the Munich Betrayal, and the milieu in which Václav Havel came of age.

The final audiobook in Maitland's critically acclaimed Belltree Trilogy. Harry Belltree's obsessive pursuit of justice has cost him everything - his job in homicide, his marriage and his newborn child. He has nothing left to lose, or so he thinks. Then his estranged wife disappears, leaving their baby daughter behind. The police think Jenny has murdered a man. Harry thinks she's in danger.

As a young and outspoken priest, Luca Rossini was brutally tortured in an Argentine military prison, and then nursed back to health by the beautiful Isabel. Exiled to Rome to avoid scandal, Rossini becomes a cardinal and the pope's confidante. He is admired and feared by his colleagues, for he understands the Church and speaks frankly. When the pope becomes gravely ill and a successor must be chosen, Rossini takes a central role. In the midst of the political intrigue that surrounds the selection of a new pope, Isabel arrives in Rome - along with Rossini's daughter.

Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte arrives in the little town of Mitford, New South Wales, to find that five babies have been abducted and a murder committed. The half-aborigine sleuth calls in Policewoman Alice McGorr to help him, and one of the most important clues they find is a cave drawing depicting an aboriginal legend. Bony, as unorthodox and cunning as ever, reenacts the legend in order to solve the mystery.

Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.

Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle. Or maybe not so quiet.