Barbara Vine has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 13 ratings. The most-rated is A Fatal Inversion.
A Fatal Inversion
Summary
In the long, hot summer of 1976 Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie are camping at Wyvis Hall. They don’t ask why they are there or how they are to live; they simply scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. But which woman? And whose child?
©1987 Kingsmarkham Enterprises (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Brimstone Wedding
Summary
Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart, and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy? As Jenny uses the house to meet her lover, she makes some unusual discoveries, but only when Stella leaves Jenny her tape recorder, into which she has recorded the true events of the past, can the truth be finally - and shockingly - revealed.
©1995 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Chimney Sweeper's Boy
Summary
The obituaries for Gerald Candless were respectful. He had been, after all, an admired and popular writer, and his sudden death at his home in Devon was a loss to literature as well as to his family and friends. The trouble was, as his daughter Sarah soon discovered, that it seemed that her father had taken on a different identity that he wasn't Gerald Candless at all. But if he wasn't Gerald Candless, who was he?
©1998 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
A Dark-Adapted Eye
Summary
Like most families, they had their secrets... ...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the '50s was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.
©1986 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Birthday Present
Summary
Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young Member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter–a beautiful, married woman named Hebe–the two become lovers, obsessed with their illicit and adventurous trysts. But when Ivor plans for a surprise daring sexual adventure as a birthday present for Hebe, things take a disastrous turn it's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing: between Ivor, a rising star of the Conservative government, and Hebe, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. On the eve of her birthday, Ivor gives Hebe a present to remember: a mock-kidnapping in which she is to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and then delivered to him. It’s all intended as mock-dangerous foreplay, but then things take a disastrous turn. After an accidental death, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal shockingly speci?c details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered–and his political future from being destroyed by scandal.
©2008 Kingsmarkham Enterprises (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Grasshopper
Summary
Clodagh was 19 when her parents packed her off to college and a relative’s house in Maida Vale, two years after the death on the pylon. They blamed her for it, everyone did.... It was hardly surprising that she fell into the arms of Silver. In his flat at the top of his parents’ house, he played host to a strange crew of young drop-outs whose pleasure was to range the rooftops. It was a happy, heady time until the moment when, on a trek 50 feet above the street, they looked into a window and saw a scene that was to lead to tragedy.
©2000 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Asta's Book
Summary
It is 1905. Asta and her husband, Rasmus, have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over 70 years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter, Ann, to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.
©2006 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Child's Child
Summary
What sort of betrayal would drive a brother and sister apart? When Grace and her brother Andrew inherit their grandmother's house, they surprise few people by deciding to move in together. But they've always got on well and the London house is large enough to split down the middle. There's just one thing they've not taken into account though: what if one of them wants to bring a lover to the house? When Andrew's partner, James, moves in, and immediately picks a fight about the treatment of gay men, the balance is altered - with almost fatal consequences. The Child's Child is both an intriguing examination of betrayal in families, and a taut, thrilling listen.
©2013 Barbara Vine (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Blood Doctor
Summary
The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal. Henry had been obsessed with blood, to him, blood was a thing of beauty and he could not fathom how anyone could flinch or faint at the sight of it. As Martin’s research deepens, he begins to wonder whether the mysterious deaths of a number of friends and relatives of his great-grandfather really were mere coincidence or did Henry’s fascination with blood have a much darker side?
©2002 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
No Night Is Too Long
Summary
Tim Cornish thought he'd gotten away with murder. For months after he'd killed his lover off the Alaskan coast, there hadn't been a word. But then the letters started to arrive. It seems that someone knows what Tim has done.... This compelling thriller delivers such a dark picture of romantic love that murder seems its natural mate. Frightening, suspenseful, and deeply unsettling, No Night Is Too Long is a modern crime masterpiece and will be enjoyed by readers of P. D. James and Ian Rankin. Barbara Vine is the pen name of Ruth Rendell. Ruth has published 14 novels under the Vine name, two of which, Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet, won the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award.
©1994 Barbara Vine (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Minotaur
Summary
Kerstin Kvist didn't know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand, house. The family turned out to be even odder than the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs. Cosway were her four daughters and a son who haunted the house. Then, just as Kerstin was getting some inkling of what was going on, a stranger sets the family on a path to self-destruction...
©2005 Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.