John Curless has narrated 32 audiobooks on Listento.it by 28 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,467 ratings. The most-rated is Iron Gold.
Blacklands
Summary
Debut author Belinda Bauer crafts an incredibly moving first novel in Blacklands. Twelve-year-old Steven is determined to put an end to his family’s misery and find the remains of his uncle, who was believed to be murdered as a child by a local pedophile. Steven spends his days digging for clues around his grandmother’s home, but when his search fails to unearth anything new, he reaches out to the only person with answers—the accused murderer now serving life in prison.
©2010 Belinda Bauer (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
The Dark Clouds Shining
Summary
In the fourth and final installment of David Downing's spy series, Jack McColl is sent to Soviet Russia, where the civil war is coming to an end. The Bolsheviks have won but the country is in ruins. With the hopes engendered by the revolution hanging by a thread, plots and betrayals abound. London, 1921: Ex-Secret Service spy Jack McColl is in prison serving time for assaulting a cop. McColl has been embittered by the Great War; he feels betrayed by the country that had sent so many young men to die needlessly. He can't stomach spying for the British Empire anymore. He's also heartbroken. The love of his life, radical journalist Caitlin Hanley, parted ways with him three years earlier so she could offer her services to the Communist revolution in Moscow. Then his former Secret Service boss offers McColl the chance to escape his jail sentence if he takes a dangerous and unofficial assignment in Russia, where McColl is already a wanted man. He would be spying on other spies, sniffing out the truth about MI5 meddling in a high-profile assassination plot. The target is someone McColl cares about and respects. The MI5 agent involved is someone he loathes. With the knowledge that he may be walking into a death trap, McColl sets out for Moscow, the scene of his last heartbreak. Little does he know that his mission will throw him back into Caitlin's life - or that her husband will be one of the men he is trying to hunt down.
©2018 David Downing (P)2018 Recorded Books
Imaginary Homelands
Summary
Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The 70 essays collected here, written over the last 10 years, cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party; religious fundamentalism in America; racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.
©1991 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Dark Winter
Summary
What Ian Rankin is to Edinburgh David Mark is to the seaport of Hull in Northern England. This is the beginning of a dynamic, thrilling series featuring detective Sgt. Aector McAvoy, a psychologically-probing investigator who finds patterns and motives in seemingly unrelated deaths in his hardscrabble town.
©2012 David Mark (P)2012 Recorded Books
The Death of Kings
Summary
In the fifth novel in the John Madden mystery series, Inspector Madden is called upon to assist Scotland Yard on a notorious decade-old murder case. On a hot summer day in 1938, a beautiful actress is murdered on the grand Kent estate of Sir Jack Jessup, close friend of the Prince of Wales. An instant headline in the papers, the confession of a local troublemaker swiftly brings the case to a close, but in 1949, the reappearance of a jade necklace raises questions about the murder. Was the man convicted and executed a decade before truly guilty, or had he wrongly been sent to the gallows? Inspector Madden is summoned out of retirement at the request of former Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair to re-open the case at Scotland Yard. Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Death of Kings is an atmospheric and captivating police procedural, and is a story of honor and justice that takes Madden through the idyllic English countryside, post-war streets of London, and into the criminal underworld of the Chinese Triads.
©2017 Rennie Airth (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Somnambulist
Summary
Once the toast of good society in Victoria's England, the extraordinary conjurer Edward Moon no longer commands the respect that he did in earlier times. Still, each night he returns to the stage of his theater to amaze his devoted, albeit dwindling, audience, aided by his partner, the Somnambulist - a silent, hairless, hulking giant who, when stabbed, does not bleed. But these are strange, strange times in England, with the oddest of sorts prowling London's dank underbelly. And the very bizarre death of a disreputable actor has compelled a baffled police constabulary to turn once again to Edward Moon for help - inevitably setting in motion events that will shatter his increasingly tenuous grasp on reality.
©2007 Jonathan Barnes (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC
A History of the Church Through Its Buildings
Summary
A History of the Church Through Its Buildings takes the listener to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity. This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith. Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus.
©2021 Allan Doig (P)2021 Recorded Books
Young Titan
Summary
In modern memory, Winston Churchill remains the man with the cigar and the equanimity among the ruins. Few can remember that at the age of 40 he was considered washed up, his best days behind him. In Young Titan, historian Michael Shelden has produced the first biography focused on Churchill’s early career, the years between 1901 and 1915 that both nearly undid him but also forged the character that would later triumph in the Second World War.
©2013 Michael Shelden (P)2013 Recorded Books
Hyde
Summary
An authentic, gothic reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, told from the villain' s perspective, that takes listeners deep into the seedy side of Victorian London and explores the nature of personality and of the subconscious. Mr. Hyde is trapped in Dr. Jekyll' s surgical cabinet, counting the days until he will face capture and be forced to make the ultimate choice about survival. Over the course of four days, he thinks back on what brought him to this moment, and he finally has the chance to tell the story of his brief but marvelous life. In liberating Mr. Hyde from the omniscient perspective of the original story, the author takes us inside the mind Hyde shares with Jekyll as he awakens after many years of dormancy, wide-eyed at being able to explore the world on his own. We feel the potions take effect. We tromp through the streets of London, drink gin in seedy pubs, we visit doll shops and menace the men who take advantage of the women there, and we attempt to rescue lost girls. We feel the strange distance of watching Jekyll' s high-class life through a membrane of consciousness. And then we feel the helplessness of someone being framed for serious crimes. The evidence all points to Hyde. Even if he didn' t intend to commit these crimes, is it possible that they have been perpetrated, without his knowledge, by his own hand?
©2014 Daniel Levine (P)2014 Recorded Books
The Throne of Caesar
Summary
It's Rome, 44 BC, and the Ides of March are approaching. Julius Caesar has been appointed dictator for life by the Roman Senate. Having pardoned his remaining enemies and rewarded his friends, Caesar is now preparing to leave Rome with his army to fight the Parthian Empire. Gordianus the Finder, after decades of investigating crimes and murders involving the powerful, has set aside enough that he's been raised to the Equestrian rank and has firmly and finally retired. On the morning of March 10th, though, he's first summoned to meet with Cicero and then with Caesar himself. Both have the same request of Gordianus - keep your ear to the ground, ask around, and find out if there are any conspiracies against Caesar's life. Caesar, however, has one other important matter to discuss. Gordianus's adopted son Meto has long been one of Caesar's closest confidants. To honor Meto, Caesar is going to make his father Gordianus a Senator when he attends the next session on the 15th of March. With only four days left before he's made a Senator, Gordianus must dust off his old skills and see what conspiracy against Julius Caesar, if any, he can uncover. Because the Ides of March are approaching....
©2018 Steven Saylor (P)2018 Recorded Books
Out of the Shadow of a Giant
Summary
What if Newton had never lived? A compelling dual biography argues that Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley easily could have filled the giant's shoes - and deserve credit for the birth of modern science. Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose place in history has been overshadowed by the giant figure of Newton, were pioneering scientists within their own right and instrumental in establishing the Royal Society. Although Newton is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and the father of the English Scientific Revolution, John and Mary Gribbin uncover the fascinating story of Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose scientific achievements neatly embrace the hundred years or so during which science as we know it became established. They argue persuasively that, even without Newton, science would have made a great leap forward in the second half of the 17th century, headed by two extraordinary figures: Hooke and Halley.
©2017 John and Mary Gribbin (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Decent Inn of Death
Summary
Snowed in at a country manor, former Scotland Yard inspectors John Madden and Angus Sinclair find themselves trapped in the company of a murderer. On a trip into Winchester, former chief inspector Angus Sinclair learns of a tragedy that has taken place in the village he is staying in. Beloved church organist Greta Hartmann has slipped and fallen to her death in a shallow creek, and while investigations conclude it to be an accident, her friend and housemate, Vera, remains unconvinced. After learning that Greta was the widow of a prominent anti-Nazi German preacher, Sinclair meets with the distraught Vera, and he resolves to dig deeper into the story. His investigations lead him to the stately manor of Julia Lesage, where she lives with her devoted staff that includes her secretary, cook, and driver. Though confined to a wheelchair, Julia is an electrifying spirit with a sharp wit, and those who know her adore her. Among those who do, a gentleman with dubious business dealings is also staying at the house - and Julia appears to be in love with him. A blizzard hits, keeping Sinclair, and later Madden, on the grounds with little to do but analyze the case of Greta's death, until a murder takes place, and everyone becomes a suspect.
©2020 Rennie Airth (P)2020 Recorded Books