Showing results by narrator "Chloe Massey" in All Categories

When a Monet is stolen from a stately home, Manchester-based private eye Kate Brannigan goes head to head with organised crime as she hunts the thieves through Europe. Meanwhile, someone is leaving a trail of bodies across the Northwest. As Kate confronts some harsh truths in her own life, the case stretches her love and loyalty to its limits.

A punchy and provcative The author of How Was It for You? is a sex worker. Let’s call her ‘Eve’. Eve is someone’s partner. Someone’s mother. And she has worked across the sex industry for twenty years: in a brothel, as an escort, in a strip club, online and as a dominatrix. In this candid memoir she reveals all: the good stuff, the bad, the downright ugly, and the boring bits too.offering a rare peep behind the scenes of sex work.

As a female cop walking the mean streets of Manchester, life can be tough for PC Lucy Clayburn. But when one of the North West's toughest gangsters is your father, things can be particularly difficult. When Lucy's patch is gripped by a spate of murder-robberies, the police are quick to action. Yet when it transpires that the targets are Manchester's criminal underworld, attitudes change.

Samuel, the day we met I knew I’d finally found what I’ve been waiting for. You. Happiness, at last. Then you left me. And now I am alone. Everyone I love leaves in the end. But not this time. I’m not giving up on us. I’m not giving up on you. When you love someone, you never let them go. That’s why for me, this is just beginning.

It's 1983, and best friends Vicky and Lucy swear that they will always be there for each other, that they'll never let anyone come between them. But fast-forward four years, and life on the Canterbury Estate has gotten very messy. Lucy has fallen for local policeman's son Jimmy. And Vicky is madly in love with Paddy, the local bad boy. The boys are bitter enemies and determined to keep the two girls apart. But then Vicky is accused of murder, and even her drug-dealer boyfriend wants her mouth shut - permanently.

Six months after the birth of her son, Emma Jane Unsworth finds herself in the eye of a storm. Nothing - from pregnancy to birth and beyond - has gone as she expected. A birth plan? It might as well have been a rough draft! Furious and exhausted, her life is the complete opposite of what it used to be. She's swapped all night benders for a grazed labia and Whac-a-Moling haemorrhoids. How did she end up here? In this brave and hilarious account of postnatal depression, Emma tells her story of despair and recovery.

Kate Lawler has never been maternal. And yet here she is: mother to Noa, after years of going back and forth about having children at all. This is the story of her journey from parentally undecided to early motherhood, via raging hormones, sleepless nights, emergency hospital trips, mum guilt, unspoken regrets and post-natal depression. This book is not a parenting manual. It won't tell you what to pack in your hospital bag, or how to get your baby to sleep. It may not help you with feeding or dealing with tantrums. But it will show you that you're not alone.

Whilst working as a living canvas for an abusive tattoo artist, Flora meets Minnie, an enigmatic circus performer who offers her love and refuge in an opulent townhouse, home to the menacing Mr Chester Merton. Flora earns her keep reading tarot cards for his guests whilst struggling to harness her gift, the Knowing – an ability to summon the dead.

Vicky Parrot wanted more out of life than working all hours in her father’s post office. Her dreams were ruined when tragedy came calling, and now happiness seems impossible. The other townsfolk have their problems too. Sylvia Barker runs the haberdashery shop, and she’s hiding more than a few secrets behind the bales of wool in the shop window. Her daughter, Rosie, wants more out of life than needles and cotton, but her headstrong ways are about to get her into trouble.

Trained and traumatised by a secret assassin program for minors, Isabel Ryans wants nothing more than a new life as a normal civilian. And she might just be in with a shot when she befriends Emma Westray, because for the first time in her life things are looking up. But when Isabel blows her cover by impulsively murdering a burglar, she draws the attention of the guilds—the two organisations who control the city of Espera. An unaffiliated killer like Isabel is either a potential asset...or a threat to be eliminated.

Billie fled her Yorkshire upbringing to pursue her dreams of finding a cure for the illness which killed her mother, yet when her father gets sick, she must return home to save the farm. But the transition from city girl to country lass isn’t easy, not least because leaving London means leaving her relationship with Joely Chevalier, French pharmaceutical femme fatale, just as it was heating up. And when she gets to Yorkshire, Billie’s shocked to discover the family dairy farm is in dire straits.

The powerful story of Cecily Neville, torn between both sides in the War of the Roses, from the critically acclaimed author of The Agincourt Bride.In fifteenth century England the Neville family rules the north with an iron fist. Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, a giant of a man and a staunch Lancastrian, cunningly consolidates power by negotiating brilliant marriages for his children....

Laura Canty is a new mum. She has her beautiful baby boy, Arthur, and a wonderful husband. She has new mum friends on the local WhatsApp group, and everyone in her life is supportive and happy for her. But Laura doesn't see it this way. In the weeks since her baby was born, like one in five women, Laura has developed post-natal depression. In fact, she has decided that the only way out of her current situation is for her to kill herself or her baby.

When Jessica Beam is thrown out of her flat, she finds herself relying on her only family: her grandmother. Things aren't going so well for Grandma, either. Her 1950s Good Woman guide books are out of print, and her mortgage is staggering. When a publisher throws them a lifeline - a new contract if they can prove the Good Woman guides still work - Jess and Matilda have to work together if they want a roof over their heads.

When Leah was editor of her local paper, two teenage girls went missing. One, Hope, was middle-class and White, from a perfect nuclear family. The other, Tilly, was a Black girl from a council estate - and a habitual runaway. Leah made the decision to put Hope on the front page, and she was found the next day. Tilly got a small mention on page 18 and was never seen again. Sixteen years on Leah still blames herself for the consequences of her decision. And now strange things are happening to her.

Young, talented, and intelligent, Terri Cox appeared to have it all. But deep down in her mind, a storm was brewing, and a series of life-changing events were about to unfold that would send her into a full mental breakdown. Using a highly effective and innovative form of psychotherapy, Terri was able to revisit the traumas of her past in order to understand the workings of her mind, and she was able to fight back and find that shiny, happy person that she'd always been before. Shiny Happy Person is the story of one girl's inspirational rise after a devastating fall.

Teen assassin Isabel Ryans now works for Comma, and she’s good at it: the Moth is the guild’s most notorious killer, infamous throughout the city of Espera. But Isabel still craves normality, and she won’t find it inside the guild. She moves in with a civilian flatmate, Laura, and begins living a double life, one where she gets to pretend she’s free. But when Isabel’s day job tangles her up with an anti-guild abolitionist movement, it becomes harder to keep her two lives separate.

The Dodds family once ruled Manchester’s underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby. Matriarch Nedra presides over the household, which bustles with activity as she prepares the welcome feast for her grandson Kelly’s return from prison. Her grieving daughter-in-law Carol is visited by both the welcome intimate ghost of her murdered lover, and by Mac, an ageing criminal enforcer, a man who may just offer her a real and possible future.

There are some friends you'll never forget...no matter how hard you try. Before: Edie is the friend that Heather has always craved. But one night it goes terrifyingly wrong. And what started as an innocent friendship ends in two lives being destroyed. After: Sixteen years later Edie is still rebuilding her life. But Heather isn't ready to let her forget so easily. It's no coincidence that she shows up when Edie needs her most.

Queenie is the aging matriarch of the Faraday family, and even death can’t break her hold over her 11-year-old granddaughter, Rowan. She’s buried with a locket that contains a lock of Rowan’s hair, and soon afterwards, Rowan is befriended by a mysterious, uncannily intelligent girl of her own age. Only her aunt Hermione suspects how sinister this is, but will retrieving the locket save her niece? By the time anyone sees what effect the ghostly influence on Rowan is having, it may be too late for her.