Charles Todd has 39 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 132 ratings. The most-rated is A Divided Loyalty.
A Matter of Justice
Summary
After two London men end their business partnership, one of them is savagely murdered in a medieval tithe barn on his estate in Somerset. Investigating the killing, Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge discovers that the victim was universally despised in Cambury - even the victim's wife and the town's police inspector are suspect. And yet in London circles, the man was highly regarded. What triggered his death? Rutledge doggedly follows a well-concealed trail that finally leads him to the one person who knows the whole truth. But it's too late to stop a spreading evil and a vicious settling of scores. As the seasoned inspector comes to understand the larger picture, he realizes he may not be able to prove what he suspects. In spite of his skill, this may be the only case in which Rutledge fails to get his man.
©2009 Charles Todd (P)2009 BBC Audiobooks America
A Cold Treachery
Summary
Charles Todd returns to the world of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Ian Rutledge in a series that the New York Times Book Review called “harrowing psychological drama” and the Washington Post Book World hailed as "among the most intelligent and affecting being written these days". This time the embattled Inspector has met his match hunting a brutal killer across a frozen hell and the one witness who may have survived a crime of…a cold treachery. "You’ll hang for this - see if you don’t! That’s my revenge! And you’ll think about that when the rope goes around your neck and the black hood comes down..." Called out by Scotland Yard into the teeth of a violent blizzard, Inspector Ian Rutledge finds himself confronted with one of the most savage murders he has ever encountered. Rutledge might have expected such unspeakable carnage on the World War I battlefields, where he’d lost much of his soul - and his sanity - but not in an otherwise peaceful farm kitchen in remote Urskdale. Someone has murdered the Elcott family at their table without the least sign of struggle. Was the killer someone the young family knew and trusted? When the victims are tallied the local police are in for another shock: One of the Elcotts’ children, a boy named Josh, is missing. Now the Inspector must race to uncover a murderer and to save a child before he’s silenced by the merciless elements - or the even colder hands of a killer. Haunted and goaded by the soldier-ghost of his own tortured war past, Rutledge will discover the tragedy of war that splintered one marriage - and pulled together another. Love, jealousy, greed, revenge - or was it some twisted combination of all of them? Any one could lead a man or woman to murder. What had the Elcotts done to ignite their killer’s rage? With time running out, Rutledge knows all too well that such a cold-blooded murderer could be hiding somewhere in the blinding snow.…
©2005 Charles Todd (P)2014 Recorded Books
A Lonely Death
Summary
Three men have been murdered in a Sussex village, and Scotland Yard has been called in. It's a baffling case. The victims are soldiers who survived the horrors of the Great War only to meet a ghastly end in the quiet English countryside two years later. Each had been garroted, with small ID disks left in their mouths. But even Scotland Yard's presence doesn't deter this vicious and clever killer. Shortly after Inspector Ian Rutledge arrives, a fourth soldier is found dead. With few clues to go on and the pressure building, Rutledge must gamble everything to find answers - his job, his reputation, and even his life.
©2011 Charles Todd. All rights reserved. (P)2011 AudioGO
A Fearsome Doubt
Summary
In 1912 Ian Rutledge watched as a man was condemned to hang for the murders of elderly women. Rutledge helped gather the evidence that sent Ben Shaw to the gallows. And when justice was done, Rutledge closed the door on the case. But Shaw was not easily forgotten. Now, seven years later, that grim trial returns in the form of Ben Shaw's widow Nell, bringing Rutledge evidence she is convinced will prove her husband's innocence. It's a belief fraught with peril, threatening both Rutledge's professional stature and his faith in his judgment. But there is a darker reason for Rutledge's reluctance. Murder brings him back to Kent where, days earlier, he'd glimpsed an all-too-familiar face beyond the leaping flames of a bonfire. Soon an unexpected encounter revives the end of his own war, as the country prepares for a somber commemoration on the anniversary of the Armistice. To battle the unsettled past and the haunted present at the same time is an appalling mandate. And the people around him - Among them the attractive widow of a friend, a remarkable woman who survived the Great Indian Mutiny; a bitter, dying barrister; and a man whose name he never knew - unwittingly compete with the grieving Nell Shaw. They'll demand more than Rutledge can give, unaware that he is already carrying the burden of shell shock, and the voice of Hamish MacLeod, the soldier he was forced to execute in the war. The killer in Marling is surprisingly adept at escaping detection. And Ben Shaw's past is a tangle of unsettling secrets that may or may not be true. Rutledge must walk a tortuous line between two murderers...one reaching out to ruin him, the other driven to destroy him.
©2002 Charles Todd (P)2014 Recorded Books
An Impartial Witness
Summary
Tending to the soldiers in the trenches of France during the First World War, battlefield nurse Bess Crawford can't help but notice the photo of a young pilot's wife every time she tends to him. But then at the railway station, in a mob of troops leaving for the front, Bess glimpses a familiar face--the pilot's wife, with another man. Later, back in France, Bess sees a newspaper with a drawing of the woman's face on the front page. She'd been murdered--the very day Bess saw her. Bess is soon on the search for a devious and very dangerous killer - a search that will put her own life in jeopardy.
©2010 Charles Todd (P)2010 BBC Audiobooks America
A Question of Honor
Summary
In the latest mystery from New York Times best-selling author Charles Todd, World War I nurse and amateur sleuth Bess Crawford investigates an old murder that occurred during her childhood in India, a search for the truth that will transform her and leave her pondering a troubling question: How can facts lie? Bess Crawford enjoyed a wondrous childhood in India, where her father, a colonel in the British Army, was stationed on the Northwest Frontier. But an unforgettable incident darkened that happy time. In 1908, Colonel Crawford's regiment discovered that it had a murderer in its ranks, an officer who killed five people in India and England yet was never brought to trial. In the eyes of many of these soldiers, men defined by honor and duty, the crime was a stain on the regiment's reputation and on the good name of Bess' father, the Colonel Sahib, who had trained the killer. A decade later, tending to the wounded on the battlefields of France during World War I, Bess learns from a dying Indian sergeant that the supposed murderer, Lieutenant Wade, is alive - and serving at the Front. Bess cannot believe the shocking news. According to reliable reports, Wade's body had been seen deep in the Khyber Pass, where he had died trying to reach Afghanistan. Soon, though, her mind is racing. How had he escaped from India? What had driven a good man to murder in cold blood? Wanting answers, she uses her leave to investigate. In the village where the first three killings took place, she discovers that the locals are certain that the British soldier was innocent. Yet the present owner of the house where the crime was committed believes otherwise, and is convinced that Bess' father helped Wade flee. To settle the matter once and for all, Bess sets out to find Wade and let the courts decide. But when she stumbles on the horrific truth, something that even the famous writer Rudyard Kipling had kept secret all his life, she is shaken to her very core. The facts will damn Wade even as they reveal a brutal reality, a reality that could have been her own fate.
©2013 Charles Todd (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
An Unwilling Accomplice
Summary
World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's career and life are in jeopardy when a murder is committed on her watch, in this absorbing and atmospheric historical mystery from New York Times best-selling author Charles Todd. Arriving in London on leave, Bess Crawford receives an unusual summons from the War Office. She's been requested to accompany a wounded soldier to Buckingham Palace, where he's to be decorated for gallantry by King George himself. Though she is certain she's never met or nursed Sergeant Jason Wilkins, she cannot refuse the honor. Heavily bandaged and confined to a wheelchair, the soldier will be in her care for barely a day. But on the morning after the ceremony when Bess goes to collect her charge for his return journey, she finds the room empty. Both the Army and the Nursing Service hold Bess to blame for losing the war hero. There is a humiliating inquiry, and the incident is noted in her record. More disturbing news complicates her already difficult situation: The Army now considers Wilkins a deserter, and Scotland Yard questions her when Wilkins is suspected of killing a man in cold blood. If Bess is to clear her name and return to duty in France, she must prove that she was never his accomplice. But the sergeant has disappeared again and neither the Army nor the police can find him. The moral implications - that a patient in her charge has committed murder - become more important to Bess than her own future. Accompanied by her friend Simon Brandon, she heads north to find the missing man herself. Carefully questioning suspicious locals, Bess and Simon follow a trail of clues across England. Drawn into a mystery that seems to grow darker with every discovery, they realize that this man has brought the war home to remote places far from the killing fields of France. But will uncovering the truth put more innocent people in jeopardy?
©2014 Charles Todd (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
A Fine Summer's Day
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Charles Todd takes readers into Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge's past - to his perplexing final case before the outbreak of World War I. On a fine summer's day in June, 1914, Ian Rutledge pays little notice to the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo. An Inspector at Scotland Yard, he is planning to propose to the woman whom he deeply loves, despite intimations from friends and family that she may not be the wisest choice. To the north on this warm and gentle day, another man in love - a Scottish Highlander - shows his own dear girl the house he will build for her in September. While back in England, a son awaits the undertaker in the wake of his widowed mother's death. This death will set off a series of murders across England, seemingly unconnected, that Rutledge will race to solve in the weeks before the fateful declaration in August that will forever transform his world. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, all of Britain wonders and waits. With every moment at stake, Rutledge sets out to right a wrong - an odyssey that will eventually force him to choose between the Yard and his country, between love and duty, and between honor and truth.
©2015 Charles Todd (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
The Shattered Tree
Summary
Edgar Award winner, Mary Higgins Clark, 2017. World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford goes to dangerous lengths to investigate a wounded soldier's background - and uncover his true loyalties - in this thrilling and atmospheric entry in the best-selling "vivid period mystery series" (New York Times Book Review). At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher bearers find an exhausted officer shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is the officer isn't British - he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German. When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian? And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie? Of course Matron could be right, but Bess remains uneasy - and unconvinced. If he was a French soldier, what was he doing so far from his own lines...and so close to where the Germans are putting up a fierce last-ditch fight? When the French officer disappears in Paris, it's up to Bess - a soldier's daughter as well as a nurse - to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.
©2016 Charles Todd (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
A Pale Horse
Summary
Late on a spring night in 1920, five boys cross the Yorkshire dales to the ruins of Fountains Abbey, intent on raising the Devil. Instead, they stumble over the Devil himself, sitting there watching them. Terrified, they run for their lives, leaving behind a book on alchemy stolen from their schoolmaster. The next morning, a body is discovered in the cloisters of the abbey--a man swathed in a hooded cloak and wearing a gas mask. Scotland Yard dispatches Inspector Rutledge to find out who the man was and why he died in such mysterious circumstances. But the villagers clearly have something to hide. And what does the huge chalk sculpture of a pale horse of the Apocalypse have to do with the crime?
©2008 Charles Todd (P)2009 BBC Audio
A Casualty of War
Summary
From New York Times best-selling author Charles Todd comes a haunting tale that explores the impact of World War I on all who witnessed it - officers, soldiers, doctors, and battlefield nurses like Bess Crawford. Though the Great War is nearing its end, the fighting rages on. While waiting for transport back to her post, Bess Crawford meets Captain Alan Travis from the island of Barbados. Later, when he's brought into her forward aid station disoriented from a head wound, Bess is alarmed that he believes his distant English cousin, Lieutenant James Travis, shot him. Then the captain is brought back to the aid station with a more severe wound, once more angrily denouncing the lieutenant as a killer. But when it appears that James Travis couldn't have shot him, the captain's sanity is questioned. Still, Bess wonders how such an experienced officer could be so wrong. On leave in England, Bess finds the captain strapped to his bed in a clinic for brain injuries. Horrified by his condition, Bess and Sergeant Major Simon Brandon travel to James Travis' home in Suffolk to learn more about the baffling relationship between these two cousins. Her search will lead this smart, capable, and compassionate young woman into unexpected danger and bring her face to face with the visible and invisible wounds of war that not even the much longed for peace can heal.
©2017 Charles Todd (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
A Pattern of Lies
Summary
A horrific explosion at a gunpowder mill sends Bess Crawford to war-torn France to keep a deadly pattern of lies from leading to more deaths in this compelling and atmospheric mystery from the New York Times best-selling author of A Question of Honor and An Unwilling Accomplice. An explosion and fire at the Ashton Gunpowder Mill in Kent has killed over a hundred men. It's called an appalling tragedy - until suspicion and rumor raise the specter of murder. While visiting the Ashton family, Bess Crawford finds herself caught up in a venomous show of hostility that doesn't stop with Philip Ashton's arrest. Indeed, someone is out for blood, and the household is all but under siege. The only known witness to the tragedy is now at the Front in France. Bess is asked to find him. When she does, he refuses to tell her anything that will help the Ashtons. Realizing that he believes the tissue of lies that has nearly destroyed a family, Bess must convince him to tell her what really happened that terrible Sunday morning. But now someone else is also searching for this man. To end the vicious persecution of the Ashtons, Bess must risk her own life to protect her reluctant witness from a clever killer intent on preventing either of them from ever reaching England.
©2015 Charles Todd (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
The Red Door
Summary
June 1920. In a house with a red door lies the body of a woman who has been bludgeoned to death. Rumor has it that two years earlier, she'd painted that door to welcome her husband back from the Front - only he never came home. Meanwhile, in London, a man suffering from a mysterious illness first goes missing and then just as suddenly reappears. He is unable to explain his recovery. Inspector Ian Rutledge must solve the cases. Who was the woman who lived and died behind the red door? Who was the man who never came home from the Great War, for the simple reason that he might never have gone? And what have they to do with a man who cannot break the seal of his own guilt without damning those he loves most?
©2010 Charles Todd (P)2010 BBC Audiobooks America
A Hanging at Dawn
Summary
“Bess is among the most compassionate and intelligent characters.” (The Sun-Sentinel) From the New York Times best-selling author of the Bess Crawford mystery series, a short story that unravels dark secrets from her close friend Simon Brandon’s past Years before the Great War summoned Bess Crawford to serve as a battlefield nurse, the indomitable heroine spent her childhood in India under the watchful eye of her friend and confidant, the young soldier Simon Brandon. The two formed an inseparable bond on the dangerous Northwest Frontier where her father’s Regiment held the Khyber Pass against all intruders. It was Simon who taught Bess to ride and shoot, escorted her to the bazaars and the Maharani’s Palace, and did his best to keep her out of trouble, after the Crawford family took an interest in the tall, angry boy with a mysterious past. But the Crawfords have long guarded secrets for Simon and he owes them a debt that runs deeper than Bess could ever know. Told through the eyes of Melinda, Richard, Clarissa, and Bess, A Hanging at Dawn pieces together a mystery at the center of Bess’s family that will irrevocably change the course of her future.
©2020 Charles Todd (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
An Unmarked Grave
Summary
World War I nurse and amateur sleuth Bess Crawford matches wits with a devious killer in this exciting and suspenseful adventure from New York Times best-selling author Charles Todd. In the spring of 1918, the Spanish flu epidemic spreads, killing millions of soldiers and civilians across the globe. Overwhelmed by the constant flow of wounded soldiers coming from the French front, battlefield nurse Bess Crawford must now contend with hundreds of influenza patients as well. However, war and disease are not the only killers to strike. Bess discovers, concealed among the dead waiting for burial, the body of an officer who has been murdered. Though she is devoted to all her patients, this soldier's death touches her deeply. Not only did the man serve in her father's former regiment, he was also a family friend. Before she can report the terrible news, Bess falls ill, the latest victim of the flu. By the time she recovers, the murdered officer has been buried, and the only other person who saw the body has hanged himself. Or did he? Working her father's connections in the military, Bess begins to piece together what little evidence she can find to unmask the elusive killer and see justice served. But she must be as vigilant as she is tenacious. With a determined killer on her heels, each move Bess makes could be her last.
©2012 Charles Todd (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
A False Mirror
Summary
Unhealed scars of the Great War still torment Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge. A haunted, damaged shell of a man, he has been sent to the small coastal town of Hampton Regis to solve a violent crime and to confront his own tragic past. An officer who served with Rutledge in the trenches of France before being sent back to England under suspicious circumstances has now been accused of savagely beating the husband of the woman he still loves. The suspect has taken the wife hostage, threatening to kill her and her maid unless Rutledge takes charge of the investigation. Although the case painfully mirrors Rutledge's own past and the love he lost to another man, he cannot refuse it. When the unconscious, brutalized victim vanishes without a trace, it's clear that this peaceful little town hides a vicious murderer and secrets powerful enough to kill for.
©2007 Charles Todd (P)2014 Recorded Books
The Walnut Tree
Summary
"I was in Paris the day the French Army was mobilized." In 1914, while visiting her friend Madeleine, Lady Elspeth Douglas's life is thrown into chaos when war breaks out and the Germans quickly overrun Belgium, threatening France. Having just agreed to marry Alain, Madeleine's dashing brother, Lady Elspeth watches him leave to join his unit, and then she sets out for England, only to find herself trapped on the French coast. Caught amid a sea of stranded travelers, terrified refugees, and wounded men overflowing the port of Calais, the restless Elspeth - daughter of a Highland aristocrat whose distinguished family can trace its roots back to the court of Mary, Queen of Scots - decides to make herself useful, carrying water to weary soldiers near the Front. It is an act of charity that almost gets her killed when enemy shells begin to explode around her. To her rescue comes Captain Peter Gilchrist, who pulls her away from the battle and leads her to safety. But before they can properly say good-bye, Elspeth and Peter are separated. Back in London, surrounded by familiar comforts, Elspeth is haunted by the horrors she witnessed in France. She also cannot forget the gallant Peter Gilchrist, even though she has promised herself to Alain. Transformed by her experience, Elspeth goes to London and enrolls in a nursing course, where she meets a fellow nurse in training, Bess Crawford. It is a daring move, made without the consent of Elspeth's guardian, her cousin Kenneth, a high-handed man with rigid notions of class and femininity. Yet Elspeth Douglas is a woman with a mind of her own, which - as she herself says—is a blessing and a curse. She is determined to return to the battlefields of France to do her part . . . and to find the man she has no right to love, no matter how far Cousin Kenneth may go to stop her. But before she can set things right with Alain, he goes missing and then Peter is gravely wounded. In a world full of terror and uncertainty, can the sweetness of love survive or will Elspeth's troubled heart become another casualty of this terrible war? A poignant, compelling tale brimming with adventure, danger, and love, The Walnut Tree is an enchanting holiday gift and a wonderful companion to Charles Todd's acclaimed Bess Crawford series.
©2012 Charles Todd (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Pretty Little Box
Summary
A simple theft leads to unforeseen tragedy in this story from the New York Times best-selling author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries. In a quaint, antiquarian bookshop in the Midlands of England, a woman is captivated by a rare gilt-edged devotional nestled within an exquisite and equally tempting box. Her desire to pilfer it overcomes her scruples, and her guilt and terror at doing something so audacious, so unlike her. With a simple sleight of hand, it's hers. But this irresistible book of hours isn't in her possession for long. By chance, desire, and cruel twists of fate, it soon falls into the covetous grip of others - from a pickpocket to a schoolboy to a priest - as one woman's transgression sets in motion a dreadful chain of events. This diabolically clever story from the New York Times best-selling author proves Stephen King was right when he said, "You're going to love Todd."
©2019 Charles Todd (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
An Irish Hostage
Summary
In the uneasy peace following World War I, Nurse Bess Crawford runs into trouble and treachery in Ireland - in this 12th book in the New York Times best-selling mystery series. The Great War is over — but in Ireland, in the wake of the bloody 1916 Easter Rising, anyone who served in France is now considered a traitor, including nurse Eileen Flynn and former soldier Michael Sullivan, who only want to be married in the small, isolated village where she grew up. Even her grandmother is against it, and Eileen’s only protection is her cousin Terrence, who was a hero of the Rising and is still being hunted by the British. Bess Crawford had promised to be there for the wedding. And in spite of the danger to her, she keeps that promise — only to be met with the shocking news that the groom has vanished. Eileen begs for her help, but how can Bess hope to find him when she doesn’t know the country, the people, or where to put her trust? Time is running out, for Michael and for Bess herself, and soon her own life is on the line. With only an Irish outlaw and a prisoner about to be hanged for murder on her side, how can she possibly save herself, much less stop a killer?
©2021 Charles Todd (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers