Sean Barrett has narrated 126 audiobooks on Listento.it by 88 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 2,263 ratings. The most-rated is The Golden Compass.
The Dark
Summary
Night falls. It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night...a small girl smiled as her mother burned...asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants...in slimy tunnels once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil. James Herbert was one of Britain's greatest popular novelists and our #1 best-selling writer of chiller fiction. Widely imitated and hugely influential, he wrote 23 novels which have collectively sold over 54 million copies worldwide and been translated into 34 languages. Born in London in the forties, James Herbert was art director of an advertising agency before turning to writing fiction in 1975. His first novel, The Rats, was an instant best-seller and is now recognised as a classic of popular contemporary fiction. Herbert went on to publish a new top ten best-seller every year until 1988. He wrote six more best-selling novels in the 1990s and three more since: Once, Nobody True and The Secret of Crickley Hall. Herbert died in March 2013 at the age of 69.
©1980 James Herbert (P)2013 Audible Ltd
The Cold Summer
Summary
The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that's not the reason why it is still remembered. On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari. The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area. The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an ex-anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect. The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy's murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.
©2018 Gianrico Carofiglio (P)2018 Audible, Ltd
Life & Works - Franz Schubert
Summary
The life of Franz Schubert has been a gift to romantically inclined biographers: the beautiful, brilliant, modest boy who sprang to fully fledged genius at the age of 16; the quintessential "artist in a garret", entirely consumed by his art and living a hand-to-mouth existence in Vienna (home of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven); the gentle, cheerful, convivial young man who prized friendship almost as highly as music itself; the unworldly poet from whom great music poured like water from a fountain; the unrecognized master who died almost penniless at the age of 31. And most of this is true. But, as revealed in this dramatized biography (lavishly illustrated with musical examples), there was a secret, darker side to Schubert which only renders his story that much more fascinating.
©2004 Naxos AudioBooks (P)2004 Naxos AudioBooks
The Fog
Summary
Please note: contains extreme violence and adult themes. Mature listeners only. The peaceful life of a village in Wiltshire is suddenly shattered by a disaster which strikes without reason or explanation, leaving behind it a trail of misery and horror. A yawning, bottomless crack spreads through the earth, out of which creeps a fog that resembles no other. Whatever it is, it must be controlled; for wherever it goes it leaves behind a trail of disaster as hideous as the tragedy that marked its entry into the world. The fog, quite simple, drives people insane.
©1975 James Herbert (P)2013 Audible Ltd
Where the Shadows Lie
Summary
One thousand years ago: an Icelandic warrior returns from battle, bearing a ring cut from the right hand of his foe.
Seventy years ago: an Oxford professor, working from a secret source, creates the 20th century’s most pervasive legend. The professor’s name? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
Six hours ago: an expert on Old Icelandic literature, Agnar Haraldsson, is murdered. Everything is connected, but to discover how, Detective Magnus Jonson must venture where the shadows lie....
©2010 Michael Ridpath (P)2011 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Bombmaker
Summary
Ten years ago, Andrea Hayes was the best master bombmaker in the business. Young, beautiful, and deadly, she was the favourite of her Irish republican masters. Then it all went wrong. Five children were killed, when disruption was all that was intended. It all became too much, and she turned away from her trade.… Now, a new Andrea Hayes lives a safe suburban life, with her loving husband and young daughter. Safe in the knowledge that her past is another country. But then her daughter is kidnapped and the past has come knocking.
©1999 Stephen Leather (P)2000 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Beneficiary
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay...like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh." (The New Yorker) A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance - financial, cultural, genetic - conspired in one person's self-destruction. Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the 800-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on - but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets. Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex. Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, 100 years hence?
©2019 Janny Scott (P)2019 Penguin Audio
The Path Forsaken
Summary
The exodite world of Ephraeleon is under attack by a deadly tyranid horde. Can the Ranger Una Belphoebe complete her rescue mission on time?
©2015 Games Workshop Limited (P)2014 Games Workshop Limited
The Zone of Interest
Summary
From one of England's most renowned authors, an unforgettable new novel that provides a searing portrait of life - and, shockingly, love - in a concentration camp. Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul - it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for 60 seconds without turning away. And no one could. The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? In a novel powered by both wit and pathos, Martin Amis excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.
©2014 Martin Amis (P)2014 W. F. Howes
Funeral Note
Summary
After a tip-off, a man's body is exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh. Murder surely, yet he died from natural causes, so, case closed? Indeed was there ever a case? But Chief Constable Skinner and his people keep on digging. Who was the man, why was he buried so reverentially, and by whom? Meanwhile corruption is discovered within the force, and an investigation launched. Immersed in crises, his marriage heading for the rocks, Skinner finds his very career hanging in the balance, its fate beyond his control. Can he win out, or will his life implode?
©2012 Portador Ltd (P)2012 Isis Publishing Ltd
Oblivion
Summary
'The Quick'. A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water, and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light. 'The Dead'. Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man’s body falls from a high platform. 'The Forgotten'. Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing. The world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not. 'The Searcher'. Erlendur Sveinsson is a newly promoted detective with a battered body, a rogue CIA operative and America’s troublesome presence in Iceland to contend with. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out, but he is already up to his neck.
©2014 Arnaldur Indridason. English translation copyright © Victoria Cribb 2015. (P)2015 Isis Publishing Ltd, Random House Audiobooks
The Shadow Killer
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Shadow Killer by Arnaldur Indridason, read by Sean Barrett. Reykjavík, August 1941. When a travelling salesman is found murdered in a basement flat, killed by a bullet from a Colt .45, the police initially suspect a member of the Allied occupation force. The British are in the process of handing over to the Americans, and the streets are crawling with servicemen whose relations with the local women are a major cause for concern. Flóvent, Reykjavík’s sole detective, is joined by the young military policeman Thorson. Their investigation focuses on a family of German residents, the retired doctor Rudolf Lunden and his estranged son Felix, who is on the run, suspected of being a spy. Flóvent and Thorson race to solve the case and to stay ahead of US counterintelligence amid rumours of a possible visit by Churchill. As evidence emerges of dubious experiments carried out on Icelandic schoolboys in the 1930s, Thorson becomes increasingly suspicious of the role played by the murdered man’s former girlfriend, Vera, and her British soldier lover.
©2018 Arnaldur Indridason and Victoria Cribb (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
The Eyewitness
Summary
Jack Solomon is a messenger of death. Working in the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, his task is to identify the victims of ethnic cleansing and to tell families that their loved ones are gone. Years of working in the killing fields have desensitised the former London policeman to the horrors of war, but when a truck containing 26 bodies is pulled from a lake, Solomon is unable to walk away from the case. He sets out to find the only survivor of the massacre, a young girl on the run from the killers. From the brothels of Sarajevo to the high-stakes world of Internet prostitution, Solomon discovers that the killers are closer to home than he thinks....
©2003 Stephen Leather (P)2003 Isis Publishing Ltd
Proceed Sergeant Lamb
Summary
The sequel to Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. As British soldiers fought their own deserting countrymen and rebel Americans came face-to-face with faithful citizens, the American War of Independence proved to be the ultimate test of loyalty. Perhaps never more so than for Sergeant Lamb: a man who, having escaped imprisonment to return to his own lines, found his mistress and daughter had changed their allegiance to Lord Cornwallis, Lamb's commanding officer. Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet and novelist, scholar, translator and writer of antiquity, specialising in Classical Greece and Rome. During his long life he produced more than 140 works. Graves's translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths, the memoir of his early life, Good-bye to All That, and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print. Graves earned his living by writing popular historical novels, including I, Claudius (for which he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), King Jesus, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961 and made an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, in 1971.
©1941 Robert Graves (P)2013 Audible Ltd
Meltwater
Summary
FreeFlow is a group of activists dedicated to freedom of information. They have evidence of a military atrocity in the Middle East and are preparing to unleash it. On the glacial rim of an erupting volcano, they christen their endeavour Operation Meltwater. Minutes later, one of them is murdered. Magnus Jonson has a long list of suspects, but he’s getting little help - for a group dedicated to transparency, they’re a secretive bunch. But they are not the only ones with secrets. Asta, a newly qualified priest, has contacted FreeFlow with damning information about the former Bishop of Iceland. And with the return of Magnus’ brother Ollie to Iceland, the feud that has haunted their family for three generations is about to reignite....
©2012 Michael Ridpath (P)2012 Isis Publishing Ltd
Sea of Stone
Summary
Oli and Magnus Jonson have spent decades trying to escape from the shadows of their past. Raised by their grandparents in Bjarnarhofn, a remote farmstead in Iceland, both brothers had to endure brutal violence at the hands of their grandfather. When Constable Pall Gylfason is called to investigate a suspected homicide in a remote farmstead, he is surprised to find Detective Magnus Jonson is already there. Magnus identifies the dead man as his estranged grandfather. Before long, Magnus is arrested for the murder of his grandfather. When it emerges that his younger brother, Oli, is in Iceland after two decades in America, Pall begins to think that Magnus may not be the only family member in the frame for murder....
©2014 Michael Ridpath (P)2014 Isis Publishing Ltd
A Fine Line
Summary
This suspenseful legal thriller tells the story of Judge Larocca, who, to quote The Brothers Karamazov, 'lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth'. A man always looking to justify his evil and corrupt behaviour, he is perhaps an apposite metaphor for Italy itself. When he becomes the subject of corruption allegations, fellow judge Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. Eventually justice will be served, though perhaps not in the most orthodox of ways.
©2016 Gianrico Carofiglio (P)2016 Audible, Ltd
Secret Warriors
Summary
The First World War is often viewed as a war fought by armies of millions living and fighting in trenches, aided by brutal machinery that cost the lives of many. But behind all of this a scientific war was also being fought between engineers, chemists, physicists, doctors, mathematicians and intelligence gatherers. This hidden war was to make a positive and lasting contribution to how war was conducted on land, at sea, and in the air, and most importantly life at home. Secret Warriors provides an invaluable and fresh history of the First World War, profiling a number of the key figures who made great leaps in science for the benefit of 20th-Century Britain. Told in a lively, narrative style, Secret Warriors reveals the unknown side of the war.
©2014 Taylor Downing (P)2014 Isis Publishing Ltd
Temporary Perfections: Guido Guerrieri Series, Book 4
Summary
Manuela, the daughter of a wealthy couple from Bari, disappeared without a trace months before and the police have closed their investigation, to the parents' despair. Counsellor Guerrieri reluctantly takes on an unusual assignment: to seek new evidence to force the police to reopen the case. It's a job more suitable to a private detective but a job that leads him to Nadia, a former client, a fascinating woman with an ambiguous past, and to the tempting Caterina, Manuela's best friend - exquisitely too young for the jaded Guerrieri....
©2012 Gianrico Carifiglio (P)2012 Audible Ltd
The Land You Never Leave
Summary
Newly and uneasily allied, two tribes from different worlds set off across the Ocean of Grass. Their mission is to fulfil a prophecy and take Ottar the Moaner west of west, to save mankind. In their way are the denizens of the Badlands, the most terrifying and powerful collection of murderers and monsters the world has ever seen.
©2018 Angus Watson (P)2018 Little, Brown Book Group