Check out the most popular audiobooks downloaded or streamed from the Listening Books collection! Updated at the beginning of every month - here is October 2024!
Another fast-paced and warm-hearted thriller from award-winning writer, and former MP, Alan Johnson. A government minister in the Foreign Office has vanished into thin air. On holiday in Crete, Lord Bellingham had been solo trekking in the White Mountains when he mysteriously disappeared. After a vast search and rescue operation, the local police have no leads, save for a mobile phone discarded on a cliff edge. Assistant Commissioner Louise Mangan of the Met Police is sent to assist in the investigation but soon discovers that there are more layers to this case than the local police realise. Lady Bellingham is less than forthcoming, the family nanny is hiding something and a scandal is brewing back in London that could destroy the minister's reputation for good. Under pressure from the powers that be, can Louise find the missing minister, or will she discover something much more sinister at play?
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She's the perfect host. He's the perfect victim. Someone is hunting Connor. Alone, freezing, in the wilderness of Bodmin Moor, on an elite Special Forces training exercise, he'd be a fool to scorn the kindness of a local stranger. Wouldn't he? At first, Eilidh seems to be an impeccable host. She offers Connor food and a warm bed - he finds it nearly impossible to leave her charming farmhouse. But the choice isn't his to make. There have been others before. None, though, as perfect as him. Why would she let him leave?
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When a baby is snatched from its pram and cast into the river Thames, off-duty police officer Lacey Flint is there to prevent disaster. But who would want to hurt a child? DCI Mark Joesbury has been expecting this. Monitoring a complex network of dark web sites, Joesbury and his team have spotted a new terrorist threat from the extremist, women-hating, group known as 'incels' or 'involuntary celibates.' Joesbury's team are trying to infiltrate the ring of power at its core, but the dark web is built for anonymity, and the incel army is vast. Pressure builds when the team learn the snatched child was just the first in a series of violent attacks designed to terrorise women. Worse, the leaders of the movement seem to have singled out Lacey as the embodiment of everything they hate, placing her in terrible danger...
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A murdered woman. A missing child. And a father intent on revenge. On a cold day in Reykjavik, a baby goes missing from her pram. When the child's blanket washes up on the beach, and the mother is found dead, everyone's worst fears seem to have been realised. Eleven years later, and detective Huldar and child psychologist Freyja are now working in the same police building, on the same team. Freyja believes that personal and professional relationships must remain separate, however hard that may be. But when a woman's dismembered body is found in a deserted car, her head missing, and Freyja and Huldar find themselves working on the same case, the secrecy around their affair threatens to crack. And when Freyja is accused of a serious breach of police protocol, will Huldar be able to help her? Meanwhile, their search to identify the body takes the case back into secrets of the past, and the unspoken crimes that bind three separate families.
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Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain. Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
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In the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, not many murder victims die almost a decade after the crime. So when a man succumbs to complications from being shot by a stray bullet nine years earlier, Bosch catches a case in which the body is still fresh, but any other evidence is virtually nonexistent. Now Bosch and his new partner, rookie Detective Lucia Soto, are tasked with solving what turns out to be a highly charged, politically sensitive case. Starting with the bullet that's been lodged for years in the victim's spine, they must pull new leads from years-old information, which soon reveals that this shooting may have been anything but random. Read by Titus Welliver, star of the Bosch TV series.
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Guernica, 1937. When the bombers appear like a flock of birds over the horizon, Sibil Helinger, 17, is enjoying market day in the small Spanish town of Guernica. With no warning, clouds of German planes are upon them and bombs fall on the town like rain. Reeling with shock, Sibil spends the next few days frantically searching for her relatives in the smouldering rubble. Though she finds her little sister trapped in the ruins, she discovers her mother and the others are dead. Years later, while WWII rages, Sibil and her sister are living with their father—an eminent scientist reluctantly working with the Nazis and a member of the undercover German resistance. Sibil has grown into a beautiful young woman fuelled by a dark rage. In short, she has grown into the perfect spy to join the resistance and fight back against those responsible for her mother's death.
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A small group of intrepid explorers are in search of a remote and mysterious artefact. It's a well-funded expedition, well organised, which is lucky as they're sailing north of Bergen on the schooner Demeter, searching for a narrow inlet which will lead them to a vast uncharted lake—and their goal—
Until disaster strikes. Doctor Silas Coade wakes from disturbing dreams, on the steamship Demeter, in pursuit of an extraordinary find almost too incredible and too strange to believe, secreted within a lagoon in the icy inlets of Patagonia. But as they come in sight of their prize, he and the crew see they are not the first to come so far: there is a wreck ahead, and whatever ruined it may threaten them as well. Shaking off his nightmares, Doctor Silas Coade joins his fellow exploders on the deck of the zeppelin Demeter and realises something has already gone dangerously wrong. If any of them are to survive, then he will have to take the exploration into his own hands...
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Bombay, 1950 When the body of a white man is found frozen in the Himalayan foothills near Dehra Dun, he is christened the Ice Man by the national media. Who is he? How long has he been there? Why was he killed? As Inspector Persis Wadia and Metropolitan Police criminalist Archie Blackfinch investigate the case in Bombay, they uncover a trail left behind by the enigmatic Ice Man - a trail leading directly into the dark heart of conspiracy. Meanwhile, two new murders grip the city. Is there a serial killer on the loose, targeting Europeans?
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Canon Daniel Clement has suffered a secret humiliation and to recover takes respite at the monastery where he was a novice. But the monastery doesn't allow the break he needs, for tensions are building there too. There is a death at the monastery, and Daniel thinks it might be murder. Meanwhile back at Champton, Daniel is the subject of village gossip, his mother Audrey is up to something again, there's trouble at the dress shop, trouble up at the big house, and the puppies are running riot. As dark secrets unfold, can Daniel solve the mystery at the monastery without the help of Detective Seargeant Neil Vanloo?
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