Elizabeth George has 34 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 373 ratings. The most-rated is The Punishment She Deserves.
The Punishment She Deserves
Summary
New York Times Best Seller Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley are forced to confront the past as they try to solve a crime that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of a quiet, historic medieval town in England The cozy, bucolic town of Ludlow is stunned when one of its most revered and respected citizens - Ian Druitt, the local deacon - is accused of a serious crime. Then, while in police custody, Ian is found dead. Did he kill himself? Or was he murdered? When Barbara Havers is sent to Ludlow to investigate the chain of events that led to Ian's death, all the evidence points to suicide. But Barbara can't shake the feeling that she's missing something. She decides to take a closer look at the seemingly ordinary inhabitants of Ludlow - mainly elderly retirees and college students - and discovers that almost everyone in town has something to hide. A masterful work of suspense, The Punishment She Deserves sets Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Inspector Thomas Lynley against one of their most intricate cases. Fans of the longtime series will love the many characters from Elizabeth George's previous novels who join Lynley and Havers, and listeners new to the series will quickly see why she is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of our time. Both a pause-resister and a deeply complex story about the lies we tell, the lies we believe, and the redemption we need, this novel will be remembered as one of George's best.
©2018 Elizabeth George (P)2018 Penguin Audio
A Banquet of Consequences
Summary
The number-one New York Times best-selling author's award-winning series returns with another stunning crime drama featuring Scotland Yard members Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. The unspoken secrets and buried lies of one family rise to the surface in Elizabeth George's novel of crime, passion, and tragic history. As Inspector Thomas Lynley investigates the London angle of an ever more darkly disturbing case, his partner, Barbara Havers, is looking behind the peaceful façade of country life to discover a twisted world of desire, deceit, and murder. The suicide of William Goldacre is devastating to those left behind. But what was the cause of his tragedy, and how far might the consequences reach? Is there a link between the young man's leap from a Dorset cliff and a horrific poisoning in Cambridge? After various career-threatening issues with her department, Barbara Havers is desperate to redeem herself. So when a past encounter with a best-selling feminist writer and her pushy personal assistant gives her a connection to the Cambridge murder, Barbara begs Thomas Lynley to let her pursue the crime. Full of shocks, intensity, and suspense from beginning to end, A Banquet of Consequences reveals both Lynley and Havers under mounting pressure to solve one of the most complex cases they have ever encountered.
©2015 Elizabeth George (P)2015 Penguin Audio
A Great Deliverance
Summary
To this day, the low, thin wail of an infant can be heard in Keldale's lush green valleys. Three hundred years ago, as legend goes, the frightened Yorkshire villagers smothered a crying babe in Keldale Abbey, where they'd hidden to escape the ravages of Cromwell's raiders. Now into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry". Yet as Lynley and Havers wind their way through Keldale's dark labyrinth of secret scandals and appalling crimes, they uncover a shattering series of revelations that will reverberate through this tranquil English valley - and in their own lives as well.
©1989 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
This Body of Death
Summary
Thomas Lynley is called back to Scotland Yard when the body of a woman is found stabbed and abandoned in an isolated London cemetery. His former team doesn't trust the leadership of their new department chief, Isabelle Ardery, but Lynley may be the sole person who can see beneath his superior officer's hard-as-nails exterior to a hidden and possibly attractive vulnerability. While Lynley works in London, his former colleagues Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata follow the murder trail south to the New Forest, a beautiful and strange place where outsiders are not entirely welcome. What they don't know is that more than one dark secret lurks among the trees, and that their investigation will lead them to an outcome that is both tragic and shocking. A multi-layered jigsaw puzzle of a story skillfully structured to keep readers guessing until the very end, This Body of Death is a magnificent achievement from a writer at the peak of her powers.
©2010 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers
In the Presence of the Enemy
Summary
Hailed as the "king of sleaze", tabloid editor Dennis Luxford is used to ferreting out the sins and scandals of people in exposed positions. But when he opens an innocuous-looking letter addressed to him at The Source, he discovers that someone else excels at ferreting out secrets as well. Ten-year-old Charlotte Bowen has been abducted, and if Luxford does not admit publicly to having fathered her, she will die. But Charlotte's existence is Luxford's most fiercely guarded secret, and acknowledging her as his child will throw more than one life and career into chaos. Luxford knows the story of Charlotte's paternity could make him a laughingstock and reveal to his beautiful wife and son the lie he's lived for a decade. Yet it's not only Luxford's reputation that's on the line: It's also the reputation - and career - of Charlotte Bowen's mother. For she is undersecretary of state for the Home Office, one of the most high-profile junior ministers and quite possibly the next Margaret Thatcher. Knowing that her political future hangs in the balance, Eve Bowen refuses to let Luxford damage her career by printing the story or calling the police. So the editor turns to forensic scientist Simon St. James for help. It's a case that fills St. James with disquiet, however, for none of the players in the drama seem to react the way one would expect. Then, tragedy occurs, and New Scotland Yard becomes involved. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley soon discovers the case sends tentacles from London into the countryside, and he must simultaneously outfox death as he probes Charlotte Bowen's mysterious disappearance. Meanwhile, his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, working part of the investigation on her own and hoping to make the coup of her career, may be drawing closer to a grim solution - and to danger - than anyone knows. In the Presence of the Enemy is a brilliantly insightful and haunting novel of ideals corrupted by self-interest, of the sins of parents visited upon children, and of the masks that hide people from each other - and from themselves.
©1996 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
For the Sake of Elena
Summary
Elena Weaver was a surprise to anyone meeting her for the first time. In her clingy dresses and dangling earrings, she exuded a sexuality at odds with the innocence projected by the unicorn posters on her walls. While her embittered mother fretted about her welfare from her home in London, in Cambridge - where Elena was a student at St. Stephen's College - her father and his second wife each had their own very different image of the girl. As for Elena, she lived a life of casual and intense physical and emotional relationships, with scores to settle and goals to achieve - until someone, lying in wait along the route she ran every morning, bludgeoned her to death. Unwilling to turn the killing over to the local police, the university calls in New Scotland Yard. Thus, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, enter the rarefied world of Cambridge University, where academic gowns often hide murderous intentions. For both officers, the true identity of Elena Weaver proves elusive. Each relationship the girl left behind casts new light both on Elena and on those people who appeared to know her best - from an unsavory Swedish-born Shakespearean professor to the brooding head of the Deaf Students Union. What's more, Elena's father, a Cambridge professor under consideration for a prestigious post, is a man with his own dark secrets. While his past sins make him neurotically dedicated to Elena and blind to her blacker side, present demons drive him toward betrayal.
©1992 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
Just One Evil Act
Summary
#1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George offers the latest in her Inspector Lynley series: a gripping child-in-danger story featuring fan favorite Barbara Havers. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers is at a loss: The daughter of her friend Taymullah Azhar has been taken by her mother, and Barbara can't really help - Azhar had never married Angelina, and his name isn't on Hadiyyah's, their daughter's, birth certificate. He has no legal claim. Azhar and Barbara hire a private detective, but the trail goes cold. Azhar is just beginning to accept his soul-crushing loss when Angelina reappears with shocking news: Hadiyyah is missing, kidnapped from an Italian marketplace. The Italian police are investigating, and the Yard won't get involved, until Barbara takes matters into her own hands. As she attempts to navigate the complicated waters of doing anything for the case against her superior's orders, her partner, Inspector Thomas Lynley, is dispatched to Italy as the liaison between the Italian police and Hadiyyah's distraught parents. In time, both Barbara and Lynley discover that the case is far more complex than just a kidnapping, revealing secrets about Angelina; her new lover, Lorenzo; and even Azhar - secrets Barbara may not be willing to accept. With both her job and the life of a little girl on the line, Barbara must decide what matters most and how far she's willing to go to protect it.
©2013 Elizabeth George (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Well-Schooled in Murder
Summary
"The Lynley books constitute the smartest, most gratifyingly complex and impassioned mystery series now being published." (Entertainment Weekly) When 13-year-old Matthew Whately goes missing from Bredgar Chambers, a prestigious public school in the heart of West Sussex, aristocratic Inspector Thomas Lynley receives a call for help from the lad’s housemaster, who also happens to be an old school chum. Thus, the inspector, his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, and forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James find themselves once again outside their jurisdiction and deeply involved in the search for a child - and then, tragically, for a child killer. Questioning prefects, teachers, and pupils closest to the dead boy, Lynley and Havers sense that something extraordinarily evil is going on behind Bredgar Chambers’s cloistered walls. But as they begin to unlock the secrets of this closed society, the investigation into Matthew’s death leads them perilously close to their own emotional wounds - and blinds them to the signs of another murder in the making....
©1990 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
A Traitor to Memory
Summary
Elizabeth George "reigns as the queen of the mystery genre", raves Entertainment Weekly, which named her novel In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner one of the 10 best books of 1999. The author who has enthralled millions with masterworks of dazzling novels of literary suspense returned with her most astonishing work yet.
"Ms. George proves that the classiest of crime writers are true novelists," proclaimed the New York Times, and each of her previous 10 novels had been an instant international best-seller. With A Traitor to Memory, George returned to the themes that had made her a master of the genre she had made distinctly her own - the classic detective story that is also a richly rewarding tapestry of passion, loyalty, and betrayal. She is a writer like no other, and her novels mark a magnificent literary achievement.
"To listen is to be, but to play is to live...." So believes Gideon Davies, 28-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist whose talents are internationally celebrated. When Gideon finds himself center stage, unable to play, his tortured search for his music - and for the truth behind the appalling event that shaped his life - will lead him to the very heart of love's darkest manifestations.
©2001 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
Believing the Lie
Summary
After writing 16 Inspector Lynley novels, New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George has millions of fans waiting for the next one. As USA Today put it, "It's tough to resist George's storytelling, once hooked." With Believing the Lie, she's poised to hook countless more. Inspector Thomas Lynley is mystified when he's sent undercover to investigate the death of Ian Cresswell at the request of the man's uncle, the wealthy and influential Bernard Fairclough. The death has been ruled an accidental drowning, and nothing on the surface indicates otherwise. But when Lynley enlists the help of his friends Simon and Deborah St. James, the trio's digging soon reveals that the Fairclough clan is awash in secrets, lies, and motives. Deborah's investigation of the prime suspect - Bernard's prodigal son Nicholas, a recovering drug addict - leads her to Nicholas's wife, a woman with whom she feels a kinship, a woman as fiercely protective as she is beautiful. Lynley and Simon delve for information from the rest of the family, including the victim's bitter ex-wife and the man he left her for, and Bernard himself. As the investigation escalates, the Fairclough family's veneer cracks, with deception and self-delusion threatening to destroy everyone from the Fairclough patriarch to Tim, the troubled son Ian left behind.
©2012 Elizabeth George (P)2012 Penguin
Missing Joseph
Summary
Deborah and Simon St. James have taken a holiday in the winter landscape of Lancastershire, hoping to heal the growing rift in their marriage. But in the barren countryside awaits bleak news: The vicar of Wimslough, the man they had come to see, is dead - a victim of accidental poisoning. Unsatisfied with the inquest ruling and unsettled by the close association between the investigating constable and the woman who served the deadly meal, Simon calls in his old friend Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Together they uncover dark, complex relationships in this rural village, relationships that bring men and women together with a passion, with grief, or with the intention to kill. Peeling away layer after layer of personal history to reveal the torment of a fugitive spirit, Missing Joseph is award-winning author Elizabeth George's greatest achievement.
©2008 Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
Payment in Blood
Summary
The producer of a troubled play invites the cast to spend the weekend in his remote Scottish Highlands estate to hash out the problems. When the housemaid finds the playwright murdered in bed, Thomas Lynley and his partner must unmask the villain.
©1992 Susan Elizabeth George (P)1992 Recorded Books
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner
Summary
Calder Moor is a wild and deadly place: Many have been trapped in the myriad limestone caves, lost in collapsed copper mines, injured on perilous gritstone ridges. But this time, when two bodies are discovered in the shadow of the ancient circle of stones known as Nine Sisters Henge, it is clearly not a case for Mountain Rescue. The corpses are those of a young man and woman. Each met death in a different fashion. Each died violently.
To Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, brought in to investigate by special request, this grisly crime promises to be one of the toughest assignments of his career. For the unfortunate Nicola Maiden was the daughter of a former officer in an elite undercover unit, a man Lynley once regarded as a mentor. Now, as Lynley struggles to find out if Nicola's killer was an enemy of her father's or one she earned herself, a disgraced Barbara Havers, determined to redeem herself in the eyes of her longtime partner, crisscrosses London seeking information on the second murder victim.
Yet the more dark secrets Lynley and Havers uncover, the more they learn that neither the victims nor the suspects are who they appear to be. Once again, they come up against the icy realization that human relationships are often murderous...and that the blood that binds can also kill.
©2009 Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
Playing for the Ashes
Summary
"The story begins with my father, actually, and the fact that I'm the one who's answerable for his death. It was not my first crime, as you will see, but it is the one my mother couldn't forgive." In her astonishing New York Times best-seller, acclaimed author Elizabeth George reveals the even darker truth behind this startling confession. Playing for the Ashes is a rich tale of passion, murder, and love in which Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers once again find themselves embroiled in a case where nothing - and no one - is really what it seems. Intense, suspenseful, and brilliantly written, Playing for the Ashes will make listeners "search out the sleuthing pair's first six adventures...a treasure", as Cosmopolitan predicted in their review.
©1994 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
A Place of Hiding
Summary
An isolated beach on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel is the scene of the murder of Guy Brouard, one of Guernsey’s wealthiest inhabitants and its main benefactor. Forced as a child to flee the Nazis in Paris, Brouard was engaged in his latest project when he died: a museum in honor of those who resisted the German occupation of the island during World War II. It is from this period of time that his murderer may well have come. But there are others on Guernsey with reason to want Guy Brouard dead: his wives, his business associates, his current mistress, the underprivileged teenagers he mentored - any of whom might have harbored a secret motive for murder. As family and friends gather for the reading of the will, Deborah and Simon St. James find that seemingly everyone on the history-haunted island has something to hide. And behind all the lies and alibis, a killer is lurking. In order to bring this person to justice, the St. Jameses must delve into Guernsey’s dark history - both past and present - and into the troubled psyche of someone who may have exacted retribution for the most unspeakable crime of all. In A Place of Hiding, best-selling novelist Elizabeth George marks new territory in the darker landscapes of human relationships. She tells a gripping, suspenseful story of betrayal and devotion, war and remembrance, love and loss...and the higher truths to which we must all ultimately answer.
©2003 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
Deception on His Mind
Summary
Balford-le-Nez is a dying seatown on the coast of Essex. But when a member of the town's small but growing Asian community is found dead on its beach, his neck broken, sleepy Balford-le-Nez ignites. Working solo without her longtime partner, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Sergeant Barbara Havers must probe not only the mind of a murderer and a case very close to her own heart, but the terrible price people pay for deceiving others...and themselves.
©1997 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2018 Random House Audio
A Suitable Vengeance
Summary
Award-winning author Elizabeth George gives us an early glimpse into the lives of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James, and Lady Helen Clyde in a superlative mystery that is also a fascinating inquiry into the crimes of the heart. Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton, has brought to Howenstow, his family home, the young woman he has asked to be his bride. But the savage murder of a local journalist is the catalyst for a lethal series of events that shatters the calm of a picturesque Cornwall village and embroils Lynley and St. James in a case far outside their jurisdiction - and a little too close to home. When a second death follows closely on the heels of the first, Lynley finds he can't help taking the investigation personally - because the evidence points to a killer within his own family.
©1991 Susan Elizabeth George (P)1993 Recorded Books
With No One as Witness
Summary
In With No One as Witness, her 13th novel, Elizabeth George has crafted an intricate and absorbing story sure to enthrall her listeners. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, along with his longtime partner, the fiery Barbara Havers, and newly promoted Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata, is back and on the hunt for a sinister killer. When an adolescent boy's nude body is found mutilated and artfully arranged on the top of a tomb, it takes no large leap for the police to recognize this as the work of a serial killer. This is the fourth victim in three months, but the first to be white. Hoping to avoid charges of institutionalized racism in its failure to pursue the earlier crimes to their conclusion, New Scotland Yard hands the case over to Lynley and his colleagues. The killer is a psychopath who does not intend to be stopped. Worse, a devastating tragedy within the police ranks causes them to fumble in their pursuit of him. With a surprise ending that will shock listeners to the core, With No One as Witness is full of the mesmerizing action and psychological intrigue that are the hallmarks of Elizabeth George's work and continue to prove that she is "a master of the English mystery" (New York Times).
©2005 Elizabeth George (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Careless in Red
Summary
In her most eagerly anticipated novel yet, Elizabeth George brings back Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley to investigate a ruthless crime. After the senseless murder of his wife, Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley retreated to Cornwall, where he has spent six solitary weeks hiking the bleak and rugged coastline. But no matter how far he walks, no matter how exhausting his days, the painful memories of Helen's death do not diminish. On the 43rd day of his walk, at the base of a cliff, Lynley discovers the body of a young man who appears to have fallen to his death. The closest town, better known for its tourists and its surfing than its intrigue, seems an unlikely place for murder. However, it soon becomes apparent that a clever killer is indeed at work, and this time Lynley is not a detective but a witness and possibly a suspect. The head of the vastly understaffed local police department needs Lynley's help, though, especially when it comes to the mysterious, secretive woman whose cottage lies not far from where the body was discovered. But can Lynley let go of the past long enough to solve a most devious and carefully planned crime?
©2008 Susan Elizabeth George (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
Payment in Blood
Summary
The career of playwright Joy Sinclair comes to an abrupt end on an isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands when someone drives an 18-inch dirk through her neck. Called upon to investigate the case in a country where they have virtually no authority, aristocratic Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers grapple for both a motive and a murderer. Emotions run deep in this highly charged drama, for the list of suspects soon includes Britain’s foremost actress, its most successful theatrical producer, and the woman Lynley loves. He and Havers must tread carefully through the complicated terrain of human relationships while they work to solve a case rooted in the darkest corners of the past and the unexplored regions of the human heart.
©2007 Elizabeth George (P)2019 Random House Audio