Showing results by author "Robert Goddard" in All Categories

On a mild autumn afternoon in 1882, William Trenchard sits smoking his pipe in the garden of his comfortable family home. When the creak of the garden gate heralds the arrival of an unexpected stranger, he is puzzled but not alarmed. He cannot know the destruction this man will wreak on all he holds most dear.

Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork. That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.

Harry Barnett, a middle-aged failure, leads a shabby existence. He is reduced to caretaking a friend's villa on the island of Rhodes and working in a bar to earn his keep. Then a guest at the villa - a young woman he had instantly warmed to - disappears on a mountain peak. Under suspicion of her murder, Harry becomes obsessed by the mystery that has changed his life and begins to trace back the movements and encounters that led to the moment where she vanished into the blue.

On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls suddenly and desperately in love with a woman he meets by pure chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he separates from his wife and goes to meet Marian at an agreed rendezvous, only to hear her tell him on the telephone that she will not, after all, be coming. Then she vanishes from his life as mysteriously as she entered it. Who and where is the woman he met and fell in love with in Vienna?

On a stifling afternoon at police HQ in Algiers, Superintendent Taleb, coasting towards retirement, with not even an air-conditioned office to show for his long years of service, is handed a ticking time bomb of a case that will take him deep into Algeria's troubled past and its fraught relationship with France. To his dismay, he is assigned to work with Agent Hidouchi, an intimidating representative of the country's feared secret service, who makes it clear she intends to call the shots.

Why should distinguished Edwardian Cabinet minister Edwin Straford resign at the height of his career? Why does the woman he loves so suddenly reject him? Why, 70 years later, should people go to such lengths to prevent the truth coming out?

The Treaty of Versailles has finally been signed, officially ending the World War I peace negotiations, and the action shifts east to Tokyo, where a team assembled at Max's behest anxiously awaits his arrival on the docks. Max had arrived in Paris soon after the end of the Great War to investigate the suspicious death of his father, a British diplomat named Sir Henry, and is soon plunged into a treacherous game of cat and mouse with the people behind his father's death.

What value can be put on a human mind? How Joe Roberts does what he does is a mystery. He has a brain that seems able to outperform a computer. To a games company like Venstrom that promises big profits if his abilities can be properly exploited. So they send Nicole Nevinson to track him down and make him an offer too good to refuse.

In The Corners of the Globe, Max is sent on his first mission for legendary German spy Fritz Lemmer, the very man who claims responsibility for the murder of Max's father. As Max travels to Scotland's remote Orkney Islands to collect a mysterious gray file from a German captain, he must keep his true allegiances in mind. Further complications arise when a fellow tourist recognizes Max from their school days and threatens to blow his cover.

When Harry Barnett is informed that his son is in hospital in a diabetic coma, he is certain that there must be some mistake, since he does not have a son. But he soon discovers that he does. David Venning was a brilliant mathematician, and his tragic condition is taken to be the result of an accident or a suicide attempt.

Best-selling author Robert Goddard presents an intricately woven and perfectly satisfying mystery with Dying to Tell. Autumn has come to the small town of Glastonbury. Lance Bradley is contemplating his own idleness when he receives an unusual phone call from the disabled sister of an old friend. Apparently, Lance’s old friend Rupert has gone missing and there are some pressing debts left unpaid. Travelling to London, Lance falls victim to an unfortunatestring of events before he realizes the only way out is to dig deeper and uncover Rupert’s secret.

Four years of horrific fighting have finally ended on the battlefield, but in the spring of 1919, Paris is filled with delegates from around the world who are still trying to hammer out the terms of peace. One such delegate is British diplomat Sir Henry Maxted, in charge of liaising with Brazilians regarding seized ships. But before a deal is reached, Sir Henry turns up dead outside a Montparnasse apartment building, apparently having fell from the roof.

It is January 1721. London is reeling from the effects of the greatest financial scandal of the age, the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. William Spandrel, a penniless mapmaker, is offered a discharge of his debts by his principal creditor, Sir Theodore Janssen, a director of the South Sea Company, on one condition: he must secretly convey an important package to a friend of Janssen's, Ysbrand de Vries, in Amsterdam.

The year is 1931. The new and luxurious transatlantic liner Empress of Britain is on her eastward passage. Among the first-class passengers on board are two English confidence tricksters, making a discreet exit from a little awkwardness they have left behind them in the United States.

It is a hot summer's day in the tourist village of Avebury. A man sits outside the Red Lion pub, waiting. He sees a woman with three young children, two of them running ahead while their sister dawdles behind. A child's voice catches on the breeze. For want of anything more interesting to do, the man watches. He sees nothing sinister or threatening. Even when another figure enters his field of vision, he does not react. The figure is ordinary - male, short-haired, stockily built. But he is moving fast, at a loping run. And then it happens. 

One fateful summer evening, businessman Robin Timariot meets a strikingly beautiful woman while out walking. They exchange only a few words, but those words prove to be unforgettable. A few days later, the newspapers are full of the rape and murder of Lady Louise Paxton - and to his horror, Timariot realises that this was the woman he met just hours before her death. A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a series of bizarre events begin to convince Timariot that all is not what it seems.

Six months after the sudden death of her husband, Leonora Galloway sets out on a trip to France with her daughter Penelope. At last the time has come when secrets can be shared and explanations begin.... Leonora takes her daughter to the battlefields of WW1, where her father is commemorated on the Thiepval Monument. But the date of his death is surprising, and reveals that Captain John Hallows cannot possibly have been Leonora's real father.

Nick Paleologus is summoned to the unyielding bosom of his family to help resolve a dispute which threatens to set his brothers and sisters against their aged and irascible father. Michael Paleologus, retired archaeologist and supposed descendant of the last Emperors of Byzantium, lives alone at Trennor, a remote and rambling house on the Cornish bank of the Tamar. A ridiculously generous offer has been made for the house, but he refuses to sell despite the urgings of his children, for whom the proceeds would solve a variety of problems.

Recovering from the recent tragedy of his wife's death in a cliff fall, Tony Sheridan goes to stay with his sister-in-law, Lucy, and her husband at their new home - Otherways - a strange circular, moated house. Disturbed by memories of his wife and a growing attraction to Lucy, Sheridan is also troubled by weird and vivid dreams. And as he and Lucy embark on a secret and passionate affair, Sheridan begins uncovering the truth about Otherways.

Eldritch Swan is a dead man. Or at least that is what his nephew Stephen has always been told. Until one day Eldritch walks back into his life after 36 years in an Irish prison. He won't reveal any of the details of his incarceration, insisting only that he is innocent of any crime....