Peter Hosking has narrated 36 audiobooks on Listento.it by 8 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 15 ratings. The most-rated is Cloudstreet.
Cloudstreet
Summary
Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years, they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.
©2002 Tim Winton (P)2008 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Barrakee Mystery
Summary
Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties. PLEASE NOTE: Part of the appeal of Arthur Upfield's stories lies in their authentic portrayal of many aspects of outback Australian life in the 1930s and through into the 1950s. These books reflect and depict the attitudes and ways of speech of that era particularly with regard to Aborigines and to women. In reproducing this book the publisher does not endorse the attitudes or opinions they express.
©1965 First published 1929 by Hutchinson and Company Ltd. © Bonaparte Holdings Pty Ltd, 1965. (P)2015 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Mr. Jelly's Business
Summary
Mr. Jelly's Business is one of the finest of Arthur Upfield's many distinguished stories about the career of Detective Inspector Napoleon ("Bony") Bonaparte. It takes Bony to the West Australian town of Burracoppin to investigate the disappearance of George Loftus, whose car was found wrecked near the longest fence in the world, the 1,500 mile Rabbit Fence. He meets Loftus's wife, who is anything but grief-stricken at her husband's disappearance; Loftus's hired man, singularly reticent about his own past history; and many of Burracoppin's numerous gossips. Later he encounters the mysterious Mr. Jelly, whose business causes his charming daughters great anxiety. The double question of Loftus' disappearance and Mr. Jelly's business taxes Bony's well-known powers of observation and deduction to the utmost, until the two problems are simultaneously solved. As anyone who knows Arthur Upfield's other work would expect, Mr. Jelly's Business is more than a story of crime and detection: It also offers an admirable picture of life in West Australia's wheat country.
Public Domain (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Bone Is Pointed
Summary
Jack Anderson was a big man with a foul temper, a sadist and a drunk. Five months after his horse appeared riderless, no trace of the man has surfaced and no one seems to care. But Bony is determined to follow the cold trail and smoke out some answers.
©1998 Arthur W Upfield (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Cake in the Hat Box
Summary
On a deserted dirt road in Western Australia a police jeep has been abandoned...enter Inspector Bonaparte. Sinister stones....on a lonely dirt road in Western Australia a police jeep is found. In it is Constable Stenhouse - shot dead. His Aboriginal tracker has disappeared, and clues are thin on the ground. Enter Inspector Bonaparte, who soon realises that he is not alone in his search for the criminal. The local Aboriginal people are seeking vengeance, too....
©1955 William Upfield (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing
Wings Above the Diamantina
Summary
The discovery of the stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things to many people. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill passenger meant a new purpose in life. For Dr Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For a person or persons unknown, it meant a murder plan gone badly awry. And for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career.
©1936 Bonaparte Holdings Pty Ltd (P)2013 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Breakaway House
Summary
A stand-alone novel from the author of the classic Australian Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte mystery series. Harry Tremayne, a policeman, goes to an isolated valley in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia to find his brother - who vanished a month earlier while investigating the murder of a police detective. Do the gold smugglers at Breakaway House hold the answers to the mystery? First published as a serial in the Perth Daily News in 1932, the real setting for Breakaway House is Mt Magnet, about 580km north of Perth, deep in gold country.
©1987 William Upfield (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing
The World Is Made of Glass
Summary
Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World Is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: ‘A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name. What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some 20 years ago, she had committed a murder.’ Jung’s encounter with the woman had an explosive effect on him and brought him very close to total breakdown. Morris West re-creates this episode in a gripping blend of truth and dramatic speculation. Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World Is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. It has been called Morris West’s finest creation of the imagination.
©1983 The Morris West Collection (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing
Crucifixion Creek
Summary
Homicide detective Harry Belltree wouldn’t usually be looking too hard at an elderly couple’s suicide pact. Especially now, when his brother-in-law, Greg, has just been stabbed to death. But it seems Greg and the old couple had ties to the same man, a bent moneylender with friends in high places - and low.
Harry can’t get officially involved in Greg’s murder, but he suspects a link with two other mysterious deaths: his parents'. And when he goes off grid to investigate, that’s when things start to get dangerous.
Set in Sydney, this dark, morally ambiguous and adrenaline-charged new series is a triumphant change of direction for Barry Maitland.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction.
©2014 Barry Maitland (P)2015 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Ash Island
Summary
Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle. Or maybe not so quiet.
A body's been found buried just offshore on Ash Island; there may be more. There's also Harry's unfinished business. The car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife happened not far from Newcastle. And Harry knows it was no accident. The other unfinished business is Jenny's longed-for pregnancy. Which means that now the stakes are higher than ever.
©2015 Barry Maitland (P)2016 Bolinda
The Shoes of the Fisherman
Summary
This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past. Not only is he the leader of a fractured Catholic Church, but he also finds he must confront his inquisitor and tormentor in order to avert another world war. An international best seller, The Shoes of the Fisherman is one of the great novels of the 20th century and is still widely popular today. It is the first novel in Morris West's Vatican trilogy.
©1963 The Morris West Collection (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing
The Dark Side
Summary
A fierce and compelling exposé of organised crime and the role of a senior law enforcement officer in Australia's multibillion-dollar drug trade.
'Each year at least $10 billion is laundered in and through Australia. Much of this money is derived from illicit drugs.'
Hooked on the limitless profits of the drug trade, organised crime has grown so powerful that it now poses a major threat to Australia's national security. Clive Small and Tom Gilling show how Australian crime gangs, in partnership with violent international syndicates, have exploited lax law enforcement and corruption on the nation's waterfront to import narcotics on a vast scale from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.
The authors reveal for the first time the corrupt history of Mark Standen, the senior investigator at the New South Wales Crime Commission whose conviction on drug importation charges sparked Australia's biggest law-enforcement crisis since the Wood royal commission. In the process they expose the cover-ups, strategic blunders and missed opportunities that continue to make Australia a soft target for international drug traffickers.
©2017 Clive Small and Tom Gilling (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Fear
Summary
Next door to us, crowded on the east and west by large houses, was the Mantles' narrow little brick place. It seemed to be subsiding crookedly into the earth like an ill-laid tombstone, and was a sunless warren, dim humidity in summer, dim moisture in winter. The laneway to its back door ran flush against our side wall, and beneath the Mantles' lounge-room window, a furze of moss grew a quarter of an inch thick on the mortar.
©1965 Thomas Keneally (P)2004 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Salamander
Summary
An Italian general is found dead in his apartment. Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames. Is it suicide or murder? Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation that leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general’s former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful onetime spy. Soon he is drawn into the net of the great Salamander himself, millionaire industrialist Bruno Manzini, who is pitting his wits against the elaborate machinery threatening Italy’s government. In a game of high stakes, how much is Matucci prepared to pay to survive?
©1973 The Morris West Collection (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Devil's Steps
Summary
Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte leaves his familiar outback environment for Melbourne and a nearby mountain resort on special assignment for Military Intelligence. Although out of his element among city people, Bony displays his characteristic skills to interpret some puzzling clues and catch a murderer - providing the ingredients for another fascinating Arthur Upfield mystery.
©1982 Arthur Upfield (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing
The Bachelors of Broken Hill
Summary
A Golden Age mystery, from the incomparable Arthur Upfield. Arthur Upfield was the first non-American to be awarded full membership of the Mystery Writers Guild of America. Among the 28,000 inhabitants of Broken Hill, there stalks a killer. Already two elderly bachelors have died horribly from cyanide poisoning. Now, two months later, Detective Inspector Napolean Bonaparte faces a cold trail - no motive, no clues. So Bony waits for what he believes to be inevitable - a third killing.
©1998 Arthur W. Upfield (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing
Masterclass
Summary
When the daughter of an old Florentine family dies, she leaves a bequest to her lover Max Mather, an American art historian who has been managing the family's rare art collection. Mather is left with two priceless artworks by the great Renaissance master Raphael - without the family's knowledge. As Mather contrives to have the artworks discovered at auction in New York, big-time collectors, dealers and auctioneers are drawn into his game. In trying to out-deal the deal makers, he becomes embroiled in a tangled web surrounding the brutal murder of a promiscuous Manhattan painter, Madeleine Bayard. The two stories intertwine in this fast-paced tale of intrigue and murder in the international art world.
©1988 The Morris West Collection (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Concubine
Summary
When Irishman Mick McCreary is offered a job drilling oil on an Indonesian island, he discovers that the beautiful Lisette is not the last of the dangers he has to face. Mick McCreary is an oilman out of a job. His only possessions are a plane ticket to Singapore, a month's pay in Indonesian rupiahs and the luck of the Irish. When the mysterious Mr Rubensohn approaches him with the offer of a breathtaking salary for a drilling operation on a remote island - no questions asked - he thinks that luck is running with him once more. But then he meets the beautiful Lisette, and within 24 hours he is involved in murder, intrigue and an international fraud of frightening proportions.
©1958 The Morris West Collection (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing
The Clue of the New Shoe
Summary
The nude body of a man is discovered entombed in the walls of Split Point Lighthouse on the South-East Coast of Australia. Investigating the crime Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, wonders why a coffin is moved at night, who was the girl struggling with Dick Lake on the cliff top, and what caused the Bully Buccaneers to deal in death. Superintendent Bolt said, 'It's the toughest job we've ever had to bash open.' An ordinary policeman could afford to fail, but Bony never....
©1967 Arthur W. Upfield (P)2003 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Gallows on the Sand
Summary
A quest for buried treasure in a shipwreck in Australia's Great Barrier Reef turns into a race against a treacherous rival. Twenty chests of minted Spanish gold in a sunken galleon - this is the lure that brings historian Renn Lundigan to a tiny island off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Renn enlists islander Johnny Akimoto to teach him scuba diving but soon realises there's a far greater danger in the reef than the sharks. Gambling den owner Manny Mannix has followed him to the island, and now he threatens not only Renn and Johnny but also the beautiful young scientist Pat Mitchell. Gallows on the Sand is a fast-paced story of high adventure, with the rich characterisation that made Morris West one of the best-selling writers of his day.
©1956 The Morris West Collection Pty Ltd (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd