Barbara Cleverly has 15 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is A Spider in the Cup.
A Spider in the Cup
Summary
At dawn one morning in 1933, an amateur dowsing team digging the banks of the Thames for precious metals unearths the body of a young woman with a missing toe and a priceless gold coin in her mouth. The case falls on Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard Joe Sandilands’ turf, but he’s been given another assignment - and a very high-profile one. London is hosting a historic global economic conference to try to solve the global Depression, and political tensions are running very high, as very influential participants are starting to take positions allied with or staunchly against the rapidly militarizing Germany. Sandilands’ job is to protect and keep an eye on the visiting American senator Cornelius Kingstone, right-hand man to President Roosevelt, throughout the conference. When a strange set of coincidences links the river bank body to the senator, Joe realizes his assignment is much bigger than he’d thought, and that Senator Kingstone is caught up in a very dangerous game - one that might cost not just one but thousands of lives.
©2013 Barbara Cleverly (P)2013 AudioGO
Invitation to Die
Summary
An "invitation to dine" quickly loses a letter as DI John Redfyre returns for his second investigation in the hallowed halls of Cambridge academia. Cambridge, 1924 in early summertime. May Balls, punting, flirting and dancing the tango are the preoccupations of bright young people, but bright young Detective Inspector John Redfyre finds himself mired in multiple murders. One morning, his dog discovers a corpse neatly laid on a tombstone in the graveyard adjoining St. Bede's College. An army greatcoat and well-worn boots suggest the dead man may have been a former soldier, though the empty bottle of brandy and a card bearing the words "An Invitation to Dine" on the victim ring a discordant note. Even more unsettling is the autopsy, which reveals death by strangulation and unusual contents in the stomach from the man's last meal. Redfyre learns that this murder is one of several unsolved cases linked to a secretive and sinister dining club at St. Bede's. Redfyre, himself an ex-rifleman, becomes caught in a dark tale of revenge, betrayal, and injustice - a lingering mystery from a long-forgotten war. With the unlikely assistance of his lead suspect, he gradually unearths the dead man's story and fights to right an ancient wrong.
©2019 Barbara Cleverly (P)2019 Recorded Books
The Palace Tiger
Summary
India 1922. When a tiger, turned man-eater, starts terrorising the northern villages of Ranipur, Governor Sir George Jardine dispatches Joe Sandilands, war hero and Scotland Yard detective, to join in a hunt for the beast as the guest of the maharajah. But Joe's suspicions are soon roused about the true nature of his trip. The maharajah is dying and his succession is unclear. The first heir to the throne has already died in a panther-wrestling incident and a second violent death occurs as Joe approaches the city. Misadventure or intention? In the glittering court, surrounded by scheming characters, Joe must track down a clever murderer, finding his way through a maze of intrigue to corner the Palace Tiger.
©2004 Barbara Cleverly (P)2005 Soundings
The Blood Royal
Summary
1922: Commander Joe Sandilands returns from a stint in India and immediately finds himself up to his neck in a tricky political situation. London is reeling from IRA atrocities and Joe is further plagued by the machinations of a spy ring being run under his nose by a Russian émigrée princess. When a war hero is gunned down and the life of a popular Englishman is threatened, Joe knows he has only days to root out the person behind the killings. With the help of the proposed victim and the services of a woman police constable, Joe discovers that the murderer’s motive is more devious than he could ever have imagined. And when the mask comes off, the killer’s identity shocks even the battle-hardened Sandilands.
©2011 Barbara Cleverly (P)2012 Soundings
Folly du Jour
Summary
Folies Bergère, Paris, 1927. Joe Sandilands hurries to the assistance of an old friend who has been arrested for murder. In a cell of the Quai des Orfÿvres, he meets with Sir George Jardine, still in the evening dress stained with the blood of the dead man. The only other witness, a blonde who was sharing the victim's box, has vanished. Assistance for Joe comes from an entirely unexpected quarter: Francine, a young usherette, clawing her way into the world of the Paris Music Hall. It is she who becomes Joe's guide through this treacherous place, where the killer is sure to be lurking.
©2007 Barbara Cleverly (P)2008 Soundings
The Last Kashmiri Rose
Summary
India, 1922. In Panikhat, 50 miles from Calcutta, the wives of officers in the Bengal Greys have been dying violently, one every year and always in March. All the deaths are bizarre and seem accidental. The only link between them is the small red roses that mysteriously appear on the women’s graves on the anniversaries of their deaths. The first victim perished in a fire, the second was bitten by a cobra, another was thrown off her horse into a ravine, while the fourth drowned. When the fifth, the pretty young wife of Captain Somersham, is found with her wrists cut, the Governor of Bengal refuses to accept a suicide verdict and calls for help from the reluctant Joe Sandilands, currently on secondment to the Bengal police.
©2001 Barbara Cleverly (P)2002 Soundings
Ragtime in Simla
Summary
Simla 1922, and the summer capital of the British Raj is fizzing with the energy of the Jazz Age. Simla is where detective Joe Sandilands is heading as the guest of Sir George Jardine, the Governor of Bengal. But when Joe’s travelling companion, a Russian opera singer, is shot dead at his side in the governor’s car, he finds himself plunged into a murder investigation. Confronted by the mystery of an identical unsolved killing a year before, Joe realizes that Sir George’s hospitality comes at a high price.
©2002 Barbara Cleverly (P)2003 Soundings
Diana's Altar
Summary
Cambridge, October 1933. Inside the old All Hallows Church on All Hallows' Eve, Dr. Adelaide Hartest witnesses the final moments of a dying stranger. Despite the dagger plunged into the stranger's chest and his last-minute confession, the death is ruled a suicide. The victim, it is revealed, is known to Scotland Yard, and Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands is sent up from London to investigate. Thrown into a deadly ring of cloak-and-dagger politics and high-society hedonism, Sandilands must uncover the truth before the Hellfire Club, an elite society composed of intelligentsia and aristocrats, topples the institutions and harms the people he has sworn to protect - especially one he has come to truly love.
©2016 Barbara Cleverly (P)2016 Recorded Books
Strange Images of Death
Summary
Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands is on leave, wending his way through France to the Riviera. En route, he stops off at a chateau in the Lubéron, where his niece is to join her father as one of the guests of a generous yet enigmatic host. But arriving at the chateau, they find that a troubling crime has been committed recently. Joe stays on to allay a rising sense of panic and root out the guilty. But despite his vigilance, first a child disappears; then an artist’s model is murdered in circumstances that eerily recreate a centuries-old crime of passion. As Joe delves ever deeper, a tale of horror unfolds that eventually unmasks the blighted soul behind the spate of recent crimes.
©2010 Barbara Cleverly (P)2010 Soundings
Tug of War
Summary
Joe Sandilands has been dispatched to France to stay as the guest of a glamorous French war-widow who is determined that Joe should support her claim that a mysterious shell-shocked soldier is her husband. The problem is that four other claimants have identified him differently. Joe decides to investigate the four claimants and picks his way through a tangle of lies, deceit, and manipulation, uncovering a cleverly concealed murder committed during the war years. When he finally discovers the identity of the soldier, he faces an even greater dilemma: he must not only solve a killing in the past, but avert a tragedy in the future.
©2006 Barbara Cleverly (P)2007 Soundings
Not My Blood
Summary
Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands is caught off guard one night in 1933 by a phone call from a distressed boy named Jackie Drummond, who just might be the illegitimate son Joe never knew he had....
©2012 Barbara Cleverly (P)2012 AudioGO
The Damascened Blade
Summary
Events that took place on the Northwest Frontier of India in 1910 are resurrected for Joe Sandilands 12 years later. On a welcome break from his duties, he is spending a fortnight with his old army friend James Lindsay, commander of the British army's fort at Gor Khatri on the Afghan border. There is an uneasy peace in operation, but into the delicate situation is injected an ill-assorted group of visitors. After a skirmish that results in the death of a Pathan prince and the taking of hostages, Joe and James are given a week in which to find the killer. Otherwise the frontier is likely to erupt into war. Drawing on all his skills, Joe sets out to find the murderer.
©2003 Barbara Cleverly (P)2003 Soundings
Enter Pale Death
Summary
One morning before dawn at her regal country estate, Lady Lavinia Truelove is crushed to death by a horse. Classified as "death by misadventure," this appears a gruesome accident, but Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands suspects foul play - a misgiving he is struggling to separate from his personal grievances toward Sir James Truelove, who is Lady Lavinia's widower and the influential academic patron of Dorcas Joliffe, whom Joe one day hopes to marry. As Joe's investigation yields surprising secrets about one of England's most powerful families, he discovers how little he knew about not only the gilded lives of the moneyed but also his relationship with Dorcas. Is Joe prepared to risk a future with the girl he loves to uncover the truth behind Lady Truelove's death?
©2014 Barbara Cleverly (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Bee's Kiss
Summary
It's 1926: Joe Sandilands is back from India enjoying the frantic pleasures of Jazz Age London. But post-war gaiety soon wears off when Scotland Yard asks Joe to conduct a swift enquiry. Dame Beatrice Joliffe, a much-respected member of the British establishment, has been bludgeoned to death in her suite at the Ritz. It seems that death dogged the footsteps of Dame Beatrice, and Joe finds himself investigating the apparent suicides of three young women who had been close to her. When his superiors unexpectedly tell him to close the case and surrender the file, Joe is forced to battle on alone against pressure from unseen government forces, through to a shattering solution.
©2005 Barbara Cleverly (P)2006 Soundings
Fall of Angels
Summary
Barbara Cleverly, best-selling author of the Joe Sandilands investigations, whisks listeners to 1920s Cambridge, a European intellectual capital on the cusp of dramatic change, with a case to be solved by an ingenious new sleuth.... Great Britain, 1923: Detective Inspector John Redfyre is a godsend to the Cambridge CID. A handsome young veteran bred among the city's educated elite, he is no stranger to the set running its esteemed colleges and universities - a society that previously seemed impenetrable to even those at the top of local law enforcement, especially with the force plagued by its own history of corruption. When Redfyre is invited to attend the annual St. Barnabas College Christmas concert in his Aunt Henrietta's stead, he is expecting a quiet evening, though perhaps a bit of matchmaking mischief on his aunt's part. But he arrives to witness a minor scandal: Juno Proudfoot, the trumpeter of the headlining musical duo, is a woman, and a young one at that - practically unheard of in conservative academic circles. When she suffers a near-fatal fall after the close of the show, Redfyre must consider whether someone was trying to kill her. Has her musical talent, her beauty, or perhaps, most importantly, her gender provoked a dangerous criminal to act? Redfyre must both seek advice from and keep an eye on old friends to catch his man before more innocents fall victim.
©2018 Barbara Cleverly (P)2018 Recorded Books