Gail Bowen has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 12 ratings. The most-rated is The Deadly Appearances.
The Deadly Appearances
Summary
The first of Gail Bowen’s popular Joanne Kilbourn mystery series, originally published in print in 1990 and reprinted again and again, as well as leading to a popular TV series, is now available in audio. Andy Boychuk is a successful Saskatchewan politician - until one sweltering August afternoon when the party faithful gather at a picnic. All of the key people in Boychuk’s life - family, friends, enemies - are there. Boychuk steps up to the podium to make a speech, takes a sip of water, and drops dead. Joanne Kilbourn, in her début as Canada’s leading amateur sleuth, is soon on the case, delving into Boychuk’s history. What she finds are a Bible college that’s too good to be true, a woman with a horrifying and secret past, and a murderer who’s about to strike again.
©1990 Gail Bowen (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
A Colder Kind of Death
Summary
When a prisoner is shot to death in the exercise yard of a Saskatchewan penitentiary, Joanne Kilbourn finds herself haunted by a part of her past she wished had never happened. The dead prisoner is Kevin Tarpley, the man who six years earlier had brutally killed her politician husband, Ian, in a seemingly senseless act alongside the TransCanada Highway. The haunting takes on a more menacing cast several days later when Tarpley's sinister wife, Maureen, is discovered dead in a snow-swept Regina parking lot. A brightly colored scarf is found wound tightly around her neck, a scarf that belongs to none other than Joanne Kilbourn. Soon this single mother, author, university professor, and TV-show panelist is deemed the number-one suspect in Maureen Tarpley's demise. Joanne knows there has to be a connection between these two murders. But what is it? A cryptic letter sent to Joanne by Kevin Tarpley just days before his death intimates that Ian Kilbourn's killing may not have been as senseless as first assumed. In fact there are hints that some of Ian's political colleagues may have been involved. But how deeply and in what way? Then there's the faded photograph of a pretty young woman and her baby that Joanne finds tucked in the wallet of her dead husband. Does it offer any clue to Ian's murder or to the deaths of the Tarpleys? Warily, Joanne Kilbourn is forced to follow a tangled trail deep into a heartbreaking past she never knew existed. A Colder Kind of Death is the fourth novel featuring Gail Bowen's reluctant sleuth, Joanne Kilbourn. With its deft mix of wry humor and mayhem, closely observed family scenes and gripping suspense, warm characterization and betrayal, it confirms Gail Bowen's stature as one of the greats of mystery fiction.
©2001 Gail Bowen (P)2015 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
The Unlocking Season
Summary
Arthur Ellis Award-winning author Grand Master Award of Crime Writers of Canada (2018) The “queen of Canadian crime fiction” (Winnipeg Free Press) returns with a new installment in the Joanne Kilbourn series that is perfect for fans of Louise Penny, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Robinson. On a Saturday bright with harbingers of spring, Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their family prepare to celebrate the season. Joanne’s life is full, and at 60, she has been given the chance to understand a part of her history that for years was shrouded in secrecy. Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend. The project’s future seems assured, but before the script is completed, Brodnitz disappears while scouting locations in Northern Saskatchewan. Hours later, he’s found - sweat-drenched, clawing at the ground, and muttering gibberish. He dies in a state of mortal terror. Heartsick and perplexed, Joanne resolves to learn what happened in the last hours of Roy’s life. What Joanne discovers threatens Brodnitz’s legacy, and the decision about whether or not to reveal the truth is hers to make. The Unlocking Season is another deeply satisfying and thought-provoking novel from one of Canada’s finest crime writers.
©2020 Gail Bowen (P)2020 ECW Press
Love You to Death
Summary
Charlie D. is the host of a successful late-night radio call-in show. His listeners have a particularly intimate relationship with him and often reveal much about themselves, confident that he will honor their trust and that he can save them. In their minds, he is perfect: one of life's winners. But Charlie feels he's something of a fake. His easy confidence on-air belies the reality for a man born with a wine-colored birthmark that covers half his face. Love You to Death covers one hour on "The World According to Charlie D." - an hour during which he must both discover the long-time listener who is killing the people who trust him and attempt to come to terms with the man behind the birthmark.
©2010 Gail Bowen (P)2013 Post Hypnotic Press
The Wandering Soul Murders
Summary
Murder is the last thing on Joanne Kilbourn's mind on a perfect morning in May. Then the phone rings, and she learns that her daughter Mieka has found the corpse of a young woman in an alley near her store. So begins Joanne's chilling collision with evil in Gail Bowen's riveting third mystery, The Wandering Soul Murders. Joanne is stunned and saddened by the news that the dead woman, at 17, was already a veteran of the streets. When, just 24 hours later, her son's girlfriend is found dead, drowned in a lake in Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Valley, Joanne's sunny world is shattered. Her excitement about Mieka's upcoming marriage, her involvement in the biography she is writing, even her pleasure at her return to Regina all fade as she finds herself drawn into a twilight world where money can buy anything and there are always people willing to pay.
©2001 Gail Bowen (P)2015 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
Murder at the Mendel
Summary
As a child Joanne was friends with Sally Love and her parents, but the friendship languished after Sally’s father died and she moved away, eventually becoming a very controversial artist. When the Mendel Gallery opens an exhibition of Sally’s work, Joanne is eager to attend and to renew their friendship. But it’s not so easy being Sally’s friend anymore, and soon Joanne finds herself ensnared in a web of intrigue and violence. When the director of a local private gallery is brutally murdered, Joanne finds that the past she and Sally share was far more complicated, and far more sordid, than she had realized.
©1991 Gail Bowen (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
One Fine Day You're Gonna Die
Summary
Charlie D is back doing his late-night radio call-in show. It's Halloween - The Day of the Dead. Not a day filled with good memories for Charlie, but the show must go on. His studio guest this evening is Dr. Robin Harris, an arrogant and ambitious "expert in the arts of dying and grieving," who also seems to be auditioning for her own radio talk show. Charlie and Dr. Harris do not hit it off. Things go from bad to worse when the doctor's ex-lover, Gabe, goes on air to announce that he's about to end his life. Dr. Harris is entirely unsympathetic until she learns that Gabe also has her daughter Kali and plans to poison her too. It will take all of Charlie D's on-air skills to save both Gabe and Kali.
©2010 Gail Bowen (P)2013 Post Hypnotic Press
A Killing Spring
Summary
Gail Bowen, winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel for her last Joanne Kilbourn mystery, A Colder Kind of Death, is back - with her most daring mystery to date. In the horrifying opening paragraph of A Killing Spring, Reed Gallagher, the head of the School of Journalism at the university where Joanne Kilbourn teaches, is found dead in a seedy rooming house. He is dressed in women's lingerie, with an electric cord around his neck. Suicide, the police say. A clear case of accidental suicide. But for Joanne, who takes on the thankless task of breaking the news to Gallagher's wife, this death is just the first in a series of misfortunes that rock her life, both professional and personal. A few days after Gallagher's death, the School of Journalism is vandalized - its offices and computers are trashed, and homophobic graffiti is sprayed everywhere. Then an unattractive and unpopular journalism student in Joanne's politics class stops coming to school after complaining to an unbelieving Joanne that she's being sexually harassed. Clearly, all is not as well at the university as Joanne had thought. Nor is all well in her love life after the casual racism of a stranger drives a wedge between Joanne and her lover, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway. To make matters worse, Joanne is unceremoniously fired by her best friend from the weekly political panel on Nationtv, which she's being doing for years. Badly shaken by these calamities, Joanne struggles to carry cheerfully on. Action, she knows, is better for her than moping. She decides to find out why her student has stopped coming to class, and in doing so, Joanne steps unknowingly into an on-campus world of fear and deceit and murder.
©1996 Gail Bowman (P)2015 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
The Gifted
Summary
Joanne Kilbourn is as feisty as ever in the 14th book of the series that bears her name. This time, Jo and Zack's young daughter Taylor's precocious talent as a painter has drawn the attention of people who may not be at all what they seem... Jo and Zack are both proud and a little concerned when their youngest daughter, Taylor - whose birth mother was a brilliant but notoriously promiscuous artist - has two paintings chosen for a high-level fund-raising auction. One they've seen; the other, a portrait of a young male artist's model, Taylor has carefully guarded in her studio. Their concern grows when it becomes clear (and quite public) that the young man is the lover of the older socialite who organized the fund-raiser - and whose husband is Zack's old friend. Soon, an ugly web of infidelity, addiction, and manipulation seems to be weaving itself around the Kilbourn-Shreve family. Jo and Zack are doing their best to keep everyone safe, but when one of the principal players in the drama is found murdered, events begin to spiral, Taylor seems to be drifting further away, and their very darkest fears seem about to be realized. The Gifted reconfirms Gail Bowen's incomparable ability to interweave the domestic and the dramatic, and to explore the dark side of human nature while ensuring that the life-affirming pillars of family and friendship remain standing.
©2013 Gail Bowen (P)2013 Post Hypnotic Press