Gordon Griffin has narrated 136 audiobooks on Listento.it by 63 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 116 ratings. The most-rated is The Razor's Edge.
The Funeral Boat
Summary
When a skeleton is discovered on a Devon smallholding, DS Wesley Peterson, a keen amateur archaeologist, is intrigued by the possibility that it is a Viking corpse, buried in keeping with ancient traditions. But he has a rather more urgent crime to solve - the disappearance of a Danish tourist. Wesley finds disturbing evidence that the attractive Dane has been abducted. His boss, Gerry Heffernan, believes that Ingeborg's disappearance is linked to a spate of brutal robberies and that she witnessed something she shouldn't have. But is her disappearance linked to far older events? For it seems that this may not have been Ingeborg's first visit to this far from quiet West Country backwater....
©2000 Kate Ellis (P)2018 Soundings
The Plague Maiden
Summary
When a letter arrives at Tradmouth police station addressed to a DCI Norbert it causes quite a stir. For though DCI Norbert has long since moved on, the letter claims to have evidence that the man convicted of murdering the Rev. Shipbourne, Vicar of Belsham, during a robbery in 1991 is innocent. Despite having a full caseload, DI Wesley Peterson is forced to at least follow up on the claims. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson is excavating a site in Pest Field. He discovers a mass grave that leads him to conclude that the site is one of an ancient medieval plague pit. But, more disturbing, is the discovery that the grave is home to a more recent resident....
©2004 Kate Ellis (P)2018 Soundings
One-Way Ticket
Summary
Tom Walsh had a lot to learn about life. He liked travelling, and he was in no hurry. He liked meeting people, anyone and everyone. He liked the two American girls on the train. They were nice and very friendly. They knew a lot of places. Tom thought they were fun. Tom certainly had a lot to learn about life. This is a collection of short stories about adventures on trains. Strange, wonderful, and frightening things can happen on trains - and all of them happen here. An Oxford Bookworms Library reader for learners of English.
©1991 Oxford University Press (P)2008 Oxford University Press
The House of Eyes
Summary
When Darren Hatman reports his daughter, Leanne, missing, DI Wesley Peterson isn't too concerned. However, Darren's claim that a photographer has been stalking her soon changes Wesley's opinion. Leanne works at Eyecliffe Castle, now converted into a luxury hotel. When Darren is found murdered on the grounds, the police fear that Leanne has met a similar fate. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson, recently returned from an excavation in Sicily, makes a disturbing discovery nearby and surprises Wesley with the news that, while in Sicily, he met Leanne's alleged stalker. With Eyecliffe Castle becoming the scene of another death, Wesley suspects a connection between the recent crimes, the disappearance of two girls in the 1950s and a mysterious Sicilian ruin called the House of Eyes.
©2016 Kate Ellis (P)2016 Soundings
A Bit of Wire-Pulling
Summary
A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories.
'It’s a very rare thing for a murder to be committed actually in the presence of a police officer.'
Or so it was thought....
After the police fail to trace the writer behind a series of threatening letters to wealthy industrialist Sir Charles Leighton, he demands constant police protection. And thus it is up to Inspector Lang to accompany the man to a bridge party on New Year’s Eve - and track down his killer....
©1951 Estate of E. C. R. Lorac (P)2018 Soundings
A Cursed Inheritance
Summary
The brutal massacre of the Harford family at Potwoolstan Hall in Devon in 1985 shocked the country and passed into local folklore. When a journalist researching the case is murdered 20 years later, the horror is reawakened. Sixteenth-century Potwoolstan Hall, now a New Age healing centre, is reputed to be cursed because of the crimes of its builder, and it seems that this inheritance of evil lives on as DI Wesley Peterson is faced with his most disturbing case yet. And when the truth is finally revealed, it turns out to be as horrifying as it is dangerous.
©2018 Kate Ellis (P)2018 Isis Publishing Ltd
Paperboy
Summary
Christopher Fowler's memoir captures life in suburban London as it has rarely been seen: through the eyes of a lonely boy who spends his days between the library and the cinema, devouring novels, comics, and cereal packets - anything that might reveal a story. Caught between an ever-sensible but exhausted mother and a DIY-obsessed father fighting his own demons, Christopher takes refuge in words. His parents try to understand their son's peculiar obsessions, but fast lose patience with him - and each other. The war of nerves escalates to include every member of the Fowler family, and something has to give, but does it mean that a boy must always give up his dreams for the tough lessons of real life? Beautifully written, this rich and astute evocation of a time and a place recalls a childhood at once entertainingly eccentric and endearingly ordinary.
©2009 Christopher Fowlr/Defiant Films (P)2012 Magna Publishing, Random House Audiobooks
The Serpent Pool
Summary
The Lake District's cold case specialist, DCI Hannah Scarlett, is determined to uncover the truth behind Bethany Friend's apparent suicide in the Serpent Pool. Why would Bethany, so afraid of water, drown herself? Hannah fears that her partner, bookseller Marc Amos, is keeping dark secrets. Does he hold the key to Bethany's past - and why was his best customer burnt to death in an Ullswater boathouse? Hannah still carries a torch for Daniel Kind, who is researching Thomas De Quincey and the history of murder. Once Daniel and Hannah suspect connections between Bethany's drowning and a current sequence of killings, death comes dangerously close to home.
©2010 Martin Edwards (P)2010 Soundings
Breakdown
Summary
Paralysis. Stuttering. The shakes. Inability to stand or walk. Temporary blindness or deafness. When strange symptoms like these began appearing in men at casualty clearing sin 1915, a debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers were never large. Then, in July 1916, with the start of the Somme battle, the incidence of shell shock rocketed. The high command of the British army began to panic. An increasingly large number of men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as to what was going wrong. Shell shock - what we would now refer to as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front. By the beginning of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another 300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army always said it could not calculate the exact number of those suffering from shell shock. Reassessing the official casualty figures, Taylor Downing for the first time comes up with an accurate estimate of the total numbers who were taken out of action by psychological wounds. It is a shocking figure. Taylor Downing's revelatory new book follows units and individuals from signing up to the Pals Battalions of 1914 through to the horrors of their experiences on the Somme which led to the shell shock that, unrelated to weakness or cowardice, left the men unable to continue fighting. He shines a light on the official - and brutal - response to the epidemic, even against those officers and doctors who looked on it sympathetically. It was, they believed, a form of hysteria. It was contagious. And it had to be stopped.
©2016 Taylor Downing (P)2016 Isis Publishing
Battles Lost and Won
Summary
1919, London's East End. Robert Hunter is eagerly awaiting the return of his father from the war. Next door, Ruth Cooper's family are also preparing to welcome her dad, whose ship was lost at Jutland. After five years of separation and anxiety – and, for Bob, the worry of caring for his frail mother – emotions are running high for both young people. But Alf Hunter, who saw action in the trenches, returns a changed man, and when he takes to drink, Bob must put his own happiness on hold to support his family…
©2011 Beryl Matthews (P)2011 Soundings
The Marriage Hearse
Summary
When Kirsten Harbourn is found strangled on her wedding day, DI Wesley Peterson makes some alarming discoveries. Kirsten was being pursued by a stalker, and she had dark secrets her fiancé knew nothing about. But Kirsten's wasn't the only wedding planned to take place that day. At Morbay register office a terrified young girl makes her wedding vows, but a few days later her bridegroom is found dead. Wesley suspects that his death and his bride's subsequent disappearance might be linked to Kirsten's murder. Meanwhile a skeleton is found buried in a farmer's field - a field that once belonged to the family of an Elizabethan playwright. Is his bloodthirsty play, The Fair Wife of Padua, a confession to murder?
©1998 Kate Ellis (P)2018 Soundings
The Tears of Autumn
Summary
For two couples honeymooning in Sorrento, the future is uncertain, but they are full of the promise of youth. The year is 1938 and the Munich crisis is just over - a relief for both Biff and Rosemary Banks and their new-found friends Konrad and Anna von Riegner. Biff is a pilot in the RAF and Konrad an Oberleutnant-zur-See in the German Kriegsmarine. Together they tour the Amalfi coast. As the time comes to part, they swear undying friendship, and resolve to meet again in a year's time. But eleven months later, their countries are torn apart by a terrible war - a war that will last for six long years. At the end of it, will their friendship have survived?
©2007 David Wiltshire (P)2009 Soundings
The Cheltenham Square Murder
Summary
In the seeming tranquility of Regency Square in Cheltenham live the diverse inhabitants of its 10 houses. One summer's evening the square's rivalries and allegiances are disrupted by a sudden and unusual death - an arrow to the head, shot through an open window at no. 6. Unfortunately for the murderer, an invitation to visit had just been sent by the crime writer Aldous Barnet, staying with his sister at no. 8, to his friend Superintendent Meredith. Three days after his arrival, Meredith finds himself investigating the shocking murder. Six of the square's inhabitants are keen members of the Wellington Archery Club, but if Meredith and Long thought that the case was going to be easy to solve, they were wrong....
©2016 Estate of John Bude (P)2017 Soundings
Paul Temple's White Christmas
Summary
A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. In this festive short story featuring Francis Durbridge’s favourite debonair amateur detective, Paul Temple journeys to Switzerland to identify an elusive criminal.
©1946 Francis Durbridge (P)2018 Soundings
Providence Lost
Summary
England, 1651. Oliver Cromwell has defeated his royalist opponents in two civil wars, executed the Stuart King Charles I, laid waste to Ireland, and crushed the late king's son and his Scottish allies. He is master of Britain and Ireland. But Parliament, divided between moderates, republicans and Puritans of uncompromisingly millenarian hue, is faction-ridden and disputatious. By the end of 1653, Cromwell has become 'Lord Protector'. Seeking dragons for an elect Protestant nation to slay, he launches an ambitious 'Western Design' against Spain's empire in the New World. When an amphibious assault on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1655 proves a disaster, a shaken Cromwell is convinced that God is punishing England for its sinfulness. But the imposition of the rule of the Major-Generals - bureaucrats with a penchant for closing alehouses - backfires spectacularly. Sectarianism and fundamentalism run riot. Radicals and royalists join together in conspiracy. The only way out seems to be a return to a Parliament presided over by a king. But will Cromwell accept the crown? Paul Lay narrates in entertaining but always rigorous fashion the story of England's first and only experiment with republican government: he brings the febrile world of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate to life, providing vivid portraits of the extraordinary individuals who inhabited it and capturing its dissonant cacophony of political and religious voices.
©2020 Paul Lay (P)2020 W. F. Howes Ltd
A Painted Doom
Summary
Teenager Lewis Hoxworthy discovers a disturbing painting in a medieval barn - a discovery which excites archaeologist Neil Watson, who is excavating an ancient manor house nearby. But when former rock star Jonny Shellmer is found shot through the head in Lewis' father's field and Lewis himself goes missing after contacting a man on the Internet, Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson and his boss, Gerry Heffernan, face one of their most intriguing cases yet. It seems that the Devon village of Derenham is not only full of resident celebrities seeking the rural idyll but also of secrets, ancient and modern.
©2002 Kate Ellis (P)2018 Soundings
Death in Captivity
Summary
A man is found dead in an escape tunnel in an Italian prisoner of war camp. Did he die in an accidental collapse - or was this murder? Captain Henry 'Cuckoo' Goyles, master tunneller and amateur detective, takes up the case. This classic locked room mystery with a closed circle of suspects is woven together with a thrilling story of escape from the camp, as the Second World War nears its endgame and the British prisoners prepare to flee into the Italian countryside.
©1952 Michael Gilbert (P)2019 Soundings
A Pact of Silence
Summary
In the long, hot summer of 1969, two young men are involved in the accidental killing of their foreman on a Shropshire building site. Traumatized, they conceal his body and vow to never mention the horrific incident again. Four decades later, DI Frank Kavanagh and DC Jane Salt’s relationship is in trouble and she, desperate to avoid the cloying atmosphere that envelopes them in London, escapes to a friend’s home in that same Shropshire town. Here, whilst trying to avoid her own relationship problems, Salt gets herself embroiled in her friend’s love life and finds herself in serious danger. Can Kavanagh help her? Will their relationship survive this ordeal? And, vitally, can they now help solve a 40-year-old murder mystery?
©2010 David Armstrong (P)2011 Soundings
The Labyrinth of Osiris
Summary
Much has changed since Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police and hard-nosed Jerusalem detective Arieh Ben-Roi last met. Ben-Roi is about to become a father, and Khalifa is struggling with personal tragedies. But as they each work on their own - seemingly isolated - cases, the two investigations begin to entwine. They soon find themselves drawn into a sinister web of violence, abuse, corporate malpractice and anti-capitalist terrorism. And at the heart of the web lies the Labyrinth...
©2012 Paul Sussman (P)2012 W F Howes Ltd
Ash and Bone
Summary
In his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder's solitary life is disturbed by a call from his estranged wife, telling him his 17-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by a rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in London, the capture of a violent criminal goes badly wrong, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked. Maddy and Frank have a connection, a brief and clumsy encounter years before. Now their lives connect again when a second phone call persuades Elder out of retirement, only to find that a cold case has a devastating present-day impact....
©2005 John Harvey (P)2006 W. F. Howes Ltd