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Narrator

Gildart Jackson

Gildart Jackson

  • When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle on the late-night train to Bath, Ishmael Jones is faced with his most puzzling case to date.

    When Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are asked to escort a VIP on the late-night train to Bath, it would appear to be a routine case. The Organization has acquired intelligence that an attempt is to be made on Sir Dennis Gregson’s life as he travels to Bath to take up his new position as Head of the British Psychic Weapons Division. Ishmael’s mission is to ensure that Sir Dennis arrives safely.

    How could anyone orchestrate a murder in a crowded railway carriage without being noticed and with no obvious means of escape? When a body is discovered in a locked toilet cubicle, Ishmael Jones has just fifty-six minutes to solve a seemingly impossible crime before the train reaches its destination.

  • A wedding. A murder. A two-hundred-year-old curse: Ishmael Jones is plunged into a baffling investigation when he answers an old friend’s call for help.

    Although he hasn’t seen Robert Bergin for forty years, Ishmael feels duty bound to respond when his old friend calls for help. Robert’s daughter Gillian is about to be married, and he is afraid she’ll fall prey to the ancient family curse.

    Arriving in rural Yorkshire, Ishmael and his partner Penny learn that the vicar who was to perform the ceremony has been found dead in the church, hanging from his own bell rope. With no clues, no evidence, and no known motive, many locals believe the curse is responsible. Or is someone just using it as a smokescreen for murder? With the wedding due to take place the following day, Ishmael has just a few hours to uncover the truth. But his investigations are hampered by sudden flashes of memory: memories of the time before he was human. What is it Ishmael’s former self is trying to tell him?

  • The sudden appearance of a sinister black hole in the English countryside leads to a baffling murder investigation for Ishmael Jones.

    “The past is England’s dreaming, and not all of it sleeps soundly …”

    Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny have been despatched to assist a group of scientists who are investigating a mysterious black hole which has appeared on a Somerset hillside. Could it really be a doorway to another dimension, an opening into another world?

    When one of the scientists disappears into the hole—with fatal consequences—Ishmael must prove whether it was an accident—or murder. But with no clues, no witnesses, and no apparent motive, he has little to go on. Is there an alien predator at large, or is an all-too-human killer responsible? Only one thing is certain: if Ishmael does not uncover the truth in time, more deaths will follow.

  • Dinner at an ancient Cornish inn leads to one baffling disappearance after another in the fifth intriguing Ishmael Jones mystery.

    “It’s just a nice weekend, in a nice country inn. Nothing bad is going to happen …”

    Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny are attending the re-opening of Tyrone’s Castle, an ancient Cornish inn originally built by smugglers. Over dinner that night, the guests entertain one another with ghost stories inspired by local legends and superstitions. But it would appear that the curse of Tyrone’s Castle has struck for real when one of their number disappears into thin air. And then another …

    Is the inn really subject to an ancient curse? Sceptical of ghost stories, Ishmael believes the key to the mystery lies in the present rather than the past. But with no bodies, no evidence, and no clues to go on, how can he prove it?

  • Ishmael Jones is faced with a dead body and a missing mummy in this highly entertaining, genre-blending mystery.

    “Death shall come on swift wings to whoever desecrates this tomb …”

    Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny have been summoned to remote Cardavan House, home of the world’s largest private collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, for the unveiling of George Cardavan’s latest acquisition: a bonafide Egyptian mummy.

    When a bloodstained body is discovered beside the empty sarcophagus, Ishmael is dismissive of the theory that the mummy’s curse is to blame. Instead he sets out to uncover the human killer responsible. But how can Ishmael explain the strange, shuffling footsteps that creep along the corridors? Who is playing games with them … and why?

  • Exploring the backstory that led to the writing of Graham Greene’s beloved satirical spy novel, Our Man Down in Havana evokes this pivotal time and place in the author’s life.

    When US immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and discovered that “every vice was permissible and every trade possible” in a Caribbean fleshpot of mafia-run casinos and nude revues. The former MI6 officer had stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. Three years later, he returned in the midst of Fidel Castro’s guerrilla insurgency against a US-backed dictator to begin writing his iconic novel Our Man in Havana. Twelve weeks after its publication, the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959, soon transforming a capitalist playground into a communist stronghold.

    Combining biography, history, and politics, Our Man Down in Havana investigates the real story behind Greene’s fictional one. This includes his many visits to a pleasure island that became a revolutionary island, turning his chance involvement into a political commitment. His Cuban novel describes an amateur agent who dupes his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about “concrete platforms and unidentifiable pieces of giant machinery.” With eerie prescience, Greene’s satirical tale had foretold the Cold War’s most perilous episode, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Exploiting a wealth of archival material and interviews with key protagonists, Our Man Down in Havana delves into the story behind and beyond the author’s prophetic Cuban tale, focusing on one slice of Greene’s manic life: a single novel and its complex history.

  • A masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes―and failures―of free-market economics

    Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt’s bestselling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can’t explain why they often fail so badly―or what we should do when they stumble. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson quipped, “When someone preaches ‘economics in one lesson,’ I advise: go back for the second lesson.” In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes―and failures―of free markets.

    Economics in Two Lessons explains why market prices often fail to reflect the full cost of our choices to society as a whole. For example, every time we drive a car, fly in a plane, or flick a light switch, we contribute to global warming. But, in the absence of a price on carbon emissions, the costs of our actions are borne by everyone else. In such cases, government action is needed to achieve better outcomes.

    Two-lesson economics means giving up the dogmatism of laissez-faire as well as the reflexive assumption that any economic problem can be solved by government action, since the right answer often involves a mixture of market forces and government policy. But the payoff is huge: understanding how markets actually work―and what to do when they don’t.

    Brilliantly accessible, Economics in Two Lessons unlocks the essential issues at the heart of any economic question.

  • In this engaging exploration, archaeologist Ian Hodder departs from the two prevailing modes of thought about human evolution: the older idea of constant advancement toward a civilized ideal and the newer one of a directionless process of natural selection. Instead, he proposes a theory of human evolution and history based on “entanglement,” the ever-increasing mutual dependency between humans and things.

    Not only do humans become dependent on things, Hodder asserts, but things become dependent on humans, requiring an endless succession of new innovations. It is this mutual dependency that creates the dominant trend in both cultural and genetic evolution. He selects a small number of cases, ranging in significance from the invention of the wheel down to Christmas tree lights, to show how entanglement has created webs of human-thing dependency that encircle the world and limit our responses to global crises.

  • Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe’s history.

    The witch came to prominence—and often a painful death—in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early modern stake.

    This book sets the notorious European witch trials in the widest and deepest possible perspective and traces the major historiographical developments of witchcraft. Hutton, a renowned expert on ancient, medieval, and modern paganism and witchcraft beliefs, combines Anglo-American and continental scholarly approaches to examine attitudes on witchcraft and the treatment of suspected witches across the world, including in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and North and South America, and from ancient pagan times to current interpretations. His fresh anthropological and ethnographical approach focuses on cultural inheritance and change while considering shamanism, folk religion, the range of witch trials, and how the fear of witchcraft might be eradicated.

  • The book that transforms our understanding of what we are and where we came from.

    Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth?

    John Hands’ extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this scientific knowledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind.

    This astonishing book provides the most comprehensive account yet of current ideas such as cosmic inflation, dark energy, the selfish gene, and neurogenetic determinism. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as string theory to approach a unified theory of everything. In doing so it challenges the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma.

    Its striking analysis reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution.

    This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.

  • Evan MacIan is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed Scottish highlander and a devout Roman Catholic. James Turnbull is a short, red-haired, gray-eyed Lowlander and a devout but naïve atheist. The two meet when MacIan smashes the window of the street office where Turnbull publishes an atheist journal. This act of rage occurs when MacIan sees posted on the shop’s window a sheet that blasphemes the Virgin Mary, presumably implying she was an adulteress who gave birth to an illegitimate Jesus. When MacIan challenges Turnbull to a duel to the death, Turnbull is overjoyed. For twenty years no one had paid the slightest attention to his Bible bashing. Now at last someone is taking him seriously!

  • A sterling roster of natural and social scientists in conversation with top-flight journalist Stefan Klein—shedding new light on their work, their lives, and what they still hope to discover

    When acclaimed science writer Stefan Klein asks Nobel Prize–winning chemist Roald Hoffmann what sets scientists apart, Hoffmann says, “First and foremost, curiosity.” In this collection of intimate conversations with nineteen of the world’s best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates), Klein lets us listen in as today’s leading minds reveal what they still hope to discover—and how their paradigm-changing work entwines with their lives outside the lab.

    From the sports car that physicist Steven Weinberg says helped him on his quest for “the theory of everything” to the jazz musicians who gave psychologist Alison Gopnik new insight into raising children, these scientists explain how they find inspiration everywhere.

    Hear from renowned scientists including:

    • evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on selfishness,
    • anthropologist Sarah Hrdy on motherhood,
    • primatologist Jane Goodall on animal behavior,
    • neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on consciousness,
    • geographer Jared Diamond on chance in history, and
    • many other luminaries.

  • From the author of Identically Different comes a new look at nutritional health, showing us that breakthrough research on microbiomes—the microbes in our stomachs—could hold the key to healthy, balanced diets.

    What should we eat? It’s a simple and fundamental question that still bewilders us, despite a seemingly infinite amount of available information on which foods are best for our bodies. Scientists, dieticians, and even governments regularly publish research on the dangers of too much fat and sugar, as well as on the benefits of exercise, and yet the global obesity crisis is only worsening. Most diet plans prove to be only short-term solutions, and few strategies work for everyone. Why can one person eat a certain meal and gain weight while another eating the same meal drops pounds? Part of the truth lies in genetics, but more and more scientists are finding that the answer isn’t so much what we put into our stomachs but rather the essential digestive microbes already in them.

    Drawing on the latest science and pioneering research, The Diet Myth explores the hidden world of the microbiome and demystifies the common misconceptions about fat, calories, vitamins, and nutrients. Dr. Tim Spector shows us that only by understanding what makes our own personal microbes tick and interact can we overcome the confusion of modern nutrition, allowing us to regain natural balance in our bodies. Mixing cutting-edge discoveries, illuminating science, and his own case studies, Spector reveals why we should abandon fads and instead embrace diversity for a balanced diet, a healthy stomach, and a nourished body.

  • A captivating debut novel about brothers who have drifted apart and the accident that will determine their future, written by an unforgettable new voice in fiction

    Some twins communicate in a secret language all their own. For Whiskey and Charlie Ferns, the two-way alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta) whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies is the best they can do. But as the brothers grow up, they grow apart. Whiskey is everything Charlie is not—bold, daring, carefree—and Charlie blames his brother for always stealing the limelight, always striving ahead while seeming to push Charlie back. By the time the twins reach adulthood, they are barely even speaking to each other.

    When Charlie hears that Whiskey has been in a terrible accident and has slipped into a coma, he is shocked … although perhaps not devastated. But as days and weeks slip by, and the chances of Whiskey recovering grow ever more slim, Charlie is forced to look back on their lives and examine whether Whiskey's actions were truly as unforgivable as Charlie believed them to be.

  • From the codirector of the Mayo Clinic / Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative and inventor of the treadmill desk comes a fascinating wake-up call about our sedentary lifestyle.

    That the average adult spends 50 to 70 percent of their day sitting is no surprise to anyone who works in an office environment. But few realize the health consequences they are suffering as a result of modernity's increasingly sedentary lifestyle, or the effects it has had on society at large. In Get Up!, health expert James A. Levine's original scientific research shows that today's chair-based world, where we no longer use our bodies as they evolved to be used, is having negative consequences on our health, and is a leading cause of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Over the decades, humans have moved from a primarily active lifestyle to one that is largely sedentary, and this change has reshaped every facet of our lives—from social interaction to classroom design. Levine shows how to throw off the shackles of inertia and reverse these negative trends through simple changes in our daily lives.

  • In this swashbuckling novel set in fifteenth-century England, young Richard Shelton discovers that he has been betrayed by the guardian who raised him—a man involved in the murder of his father. Seventeen-year-old Richard joins the fellowship of the Black Arrow to avenge the death, rescue the woman he loves, and participate in the struggle between the Yorks and Lancasters in the War of the Roses.

    Though history records two sides fighting for control of England, The Black Arrow presents a third side: the exploited commoners joined together by their black-arrow weaponry. To survive the war, Richard must rely on his cunning. Through adventures in castles, villages, forests, and aboard a ship, Richard outfoxes captors, bargains his way out of crises, and ultimately proves himself worthy of knighthood.