M. J. Trow has 12 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Silent Court.
Silent Court
Summary
November, 1583. Desperate not to let the Protestant Low Countries fall into the hands of the Catholic Spain, the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, orders Cambridge scholar and novice spy, Christopher Marlowe, to assist the beleaguered Dutch leader, William the Silent, whose court is a hotbed of intrigue and treachery. However, travelling in disguise as part of a troupe of Egyptian players, Marlowe encounters trouble even before he reaches Dutch shores. When the players make a detour to perform at the home of the Queen’s magus, Dr John Dee, one of their tricks ends in tragedy – and an arrest for murder. Charged with protecting the Dutch leader from his enemies within, Marlowe determines to unmask a cold-blooded killer much closer to home.
©2011 M. J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman (P)2013 Soundings
Brigade: The Further Adventures of Lestrade
Summary
There is a new broom at Scotland Yard: Nimrod Frost. His first “little job” for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall. This is hardly a task for an Inspector. Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead - horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to more suspicious deaths - all old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection? Lestrade's superiors, especially Nimrod Frost, discount his speculations, and he finds himself suspended from duty. But that is a mere technicality. He moves from workhouse to royal palace, from back stage at the Lyceum to regimental dinner in his search for enlightenment.
©2000 Regnery Publishing (P)2011 Soundings
Scorpion's Nest
Summary
July 1586. Sir Francis Walsingham has dispatched Kit Marlowe to the English College, the school for exiled priests in Rheims, where he suspects the Catholic traitor Matthew Baxter is hiding - the only one of the Babington plotters to have escaped the spymaster's net. Infiltrating the college undercover, Marlowe learns that the community has been rocked by a series of unexplained and violent deaths. A scholar has fallen from a window under mysterious circumstances; the popular Father Laurenticus has been discovered dead in his bed, his throat slit from ear to ear. With the help of master codebreaker Thomas Phelippes, can Christopher Marlowe unearth a murderer, track down a traitor and extract himself from the scorpion's nest without being fatally stung?
©2012 M. J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman (P)2016 Soundings
Maxwell's Reunion
Summary
When Peter Maxwell attends a school reunion of the class of '65, all is not as it seems among his old chums. They are career men, family men - but the years have taken their toll, and the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. At the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school. When a second death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. What is the secret that has been lurking under Maxwell's nose all these years - and could he be on the murderer's list for killing number three?
©2001 M. J. Trow (P)2002 Soundings
Lestrade and the Guardian Angel
Summary
The first fatality in a bizarre series of killings is a Captain of the Second Life Guards, found in the River Thames with a war medal wedged between his teeth. Then a dead Egyptologist is discovered with a scarab clamped between his molars. When a young soldier is found dead in the saddle (this time a locket is the dying mouthful), Sholto Lestrade is forced to impersonate a barrack-room lawyer. His hunt for clues takes him on a near-fatal trip in a hot-air balloon, on a disastrous bicycle tour ending with a night in jail, and to London’s East End. Eventually, some seven cadavers later, things begin to fit into place and the final conundrum emerges. Who or what is Coquette Perameles?
©1999 Regnery Publishing (P)2012 Soundings
Lestrade and the Dead Man's Hand
Summary
“Dark and deadly and halfway to hell.” This is London’s Underground Railway, and the description proves only too true in 1895. The murder of Sarah Culdrose is just the first in a series of mysterious and often gruesome deaths that the city’s subterranean trains will witness. The deceased - all women - pile up quickly. There is a maniac at large, and Inspector Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard is detailed to work with the Railway Police. The detective plunges through a tangled web of deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London fears for her life. Will the London Transport System survive? Or will Lestrade run out of steam?
©2000 Regnery Publishing, Inc. (P)2011 Soundings
Lestrade and the Deadly Game
Summary
The papers call it suicide. The deceased’s father doesn’t. And when Superintendent Lestrade investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, his suspicions are immediately aroused. One of Britain’s leading athletes, Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the torch of the Olympic Games in London, in that glorious summer of 1908. When a hurdler of the ladies’ team falls victim to her own bust improver, fingers are pointed in all directions, and not the least of Lestrade’s worries is that he is dogged by an investigative journalist, whose husband is a jealous American detective with a short temper.
©2014 M. J. Trow (P)2014 Soundings
Lestrade and the Kiss of Horus
Summary
'And death shall come on soft wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh.' The wings that retired Superintendent Lestrade comes on are those of a de Haviland Hercules. The archaeologist Howard Carter has made the discovery of the century in the Valley of the Kings, but all around him men are dying. Lord Carnarvon, careless with his razor, falls prey to a mosquito bite. Alain le Clerk leaves the tomb in a hurry to die alone in the desert. Aaron G String, the railway magnate, blows his brains out yards from the tomb's entrance. And so it is that Sholto Lestrade flies east to solve a riddle every bit as impenetrable as that of the Sphinx.
©2013 M. J. Trow (P)2017 Soundings
Dark Entry
Summary
Cambridge, 1583. About to graduate from Corpus Christi, the young Christopher Marlowe spends his days studying Virgil and Aristotle, and his nights carousing with old friends. But when one of them, Ralph Whittingside, is discovered lying dead in his King’s College room, mouth open in a silent scream, Marlowe refuses to accept the official verdict of suicide. Calling on the help of his mentor, Sir Roger Manwood, Justice of the Peace, and Dr John Dee, a man who knows more of poisons than anyone else, Marlowe sets out to prove that his boyhood friend was murdered. But, if Whittingside did not die by his own hand, who was responsible?
©2011 M. J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman (P)2012 Soundings
Lestrade and the Gift of the Prince
Summary
Murder is afoot among the footmen of Britain's Royal Household: a servant girl, Amy Macpherson, has been brutally slaughtered. And so our hero, Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard, is once again on the trail of mystery. As he tries to untangle a villainous web of conspiracy, the superintendent must venture north to Scotland. His investigations take him from Balmoral Castle to the Isle of Skye to the North British Hotel, where he narrowly escapes an inferno in Room 13. The intrepid investigator contends with the most baffling clues he has yet encountered. But even when Lestrade is threatened by a fiendishly gruesome killer, he perseveres to get his man.
©2000 Regnery Publishing (P)2013 Soundings
Lestrade and the Giant Rat of Sumatra
Summary
Everybody, they say, has a book in them. Retired Chief Inspector Walter Dew certainly did. But, under the streets of London, something stirred. More than that, there was a muttering that grew to a grumbling, and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling. Then out of the houses, the bodies came tumbling! Superintendent Sholto Lestrade, with Dew by his side and the rookies Bang and Olufsen in his wake, must go Below to face their demons, to find a murderer whose machinations will upset the infrastructure of the richest city on earth. Will any of them live to tell Dew’s tale? The tale of a rat.
©2014 M. J. Trow (P)2018 Soundings
Maxwell's Inspection
Summary
There comes a time in every teacher's life when he must face his nemesis - the Ofsted Inspection. On the third day, with the atmosphere at Leighford High decidedly fraught, one of the Inspectors is found stabbed to death. Events move quickly, and the Head is arrested on suspicion of the murder. But Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, cannot help but notice that Sally Meninger, the Ofsted Humanities expert, is not as distraught at her colleague's death as one might expect. But is it that simple? Aided by his inside informant, lover DS Jacquie Carpenter, Maxwell sets out to prove that the Head is innocent. And the only way to do it is to take on the Inspectors one by one....
©2003 M. J. Trow (P)2005 Soundings