Each month, we highlight a selection of the top titles borrowed from the Listening Books collection - the audiobooks our members have borrowed the most this month.
Undercover ops are always dangerous, but DC Constance Fairchild never expected things to go this wrong. Returning to their base of operations, an anonymous office in a shabby neighbourhood, she finds the bloodied body of her boss, and friend, DI Pete Copperthwaite. He's been executed - a single shot to the head. In the aftermath, it seems someone in the Met is determined to make sure that blame for the wrecked operation falls squarely on Con's shoulders. She is cut loose and cast out, angry and alone with her grief... right until the moment someone also tries to put a bullet through her head. There's no place to hide, and no time to cry. This audiobook contains an exclusive introduction to Constance Fairchild from James Oswald.
Borrow No Time to Cry by James Oswald
Maggie Tyson loves living in the utterly charming village, Mousehole. She spends her days walking the local coastal paths, solving the latest crossword puzzle, and working in the small town's only fish and chip shop. Looking for a fresh start, Ryan Stepney is in desperate need of a job, and stumbles across a vacancy at the chip shop. When a body is found by the harbour, shock ripples through the village. And as Ryan was the last person seen talking to the victim, he becomes the number one suspect in the investigation. Maggie is certain that her new colleague had nothing to do with the murder, so swaps her apron for a magnifying glass, and starts to investigate herself. Can Maggie prove Ryan's innocence and reel in the killer, before they strike again?
Borrow The Fish and Chip Shop Detectives by Jenny Kane
Eighties pop band The A64 are reuniting for the gig of a lifetime at Scarborough's Open Air Theatre, and Helen Dexter is overjoyed when they book into her Seaview Hotel. However, as old tensions rise within the band, it's clear each musician has something to hide. Why is lead singer Starr running away from her past? Why is Pete the drummer secretive about where he's been for the last forty years? And when guitarist Dave breaks his legs in a freak window-cleaning accident, a new guitarist arrives, causing even more discord for all. Then, as the band rehearse for their comeback gig, a dead body is found. Can Seaview Hotel landlady Helen Dexter and her rescue greyhound Suki hit the right note and solve the crime?
Borrow 3. Music to Die For at the Seaview Hotel by Glenda Young
A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation . . . A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
Borrow Black Bag by Luke Kennard
My life's changed a lot since This Country came out. Among all the amazing times there have been some stranger ones: the time a man climbed the wall into my garden and curled one out on the lawn while staring me dead in the eyes. Or that time I was visited by a pair of legs running around my bedroom as I watched Paw Patrol with my son. And I will never ever forget joining a coven, regressing to a past life, and attempting to have sex with a ghost. I know that talking about this stuff still feels very taboo. If you say you are a believer in certain circles it's like announcing to a meeting of the Women's Institute that you masturbate. Or dropping the C-bomb in front of a parish priest. But for as long as I can remember I've been fascinated by the unexplained. I've explored haunted houses, interrogated experts who claim they can communicate with the other side, and investigated paganism, which turned out to be a front for swinging.
Borrow Hexy Witch by Daisy May Cooper
As seagulls shriek and rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the bustling port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time. Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote and fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage; her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town's minister; the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow; and the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, the malevolent Farquhar Hossack. When the laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set into motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community. . .
Borrow The Cromarty Library Circle by Shona MacLean
Suspended from duty after her last case ended in the high-profile arrest of one of Britain's wealthiest men, DC Constance Fairchild is trying to stay away from the limelight. Fate has other ideas . . . Coming home to her London flat, Constance stumbles across a young man, bloodied, mutilated and barely alive. She calls it in and is quickly thrown into the middle of a nationwide investigation . . . It seems that the victim is just the latest in a string of similar ritualistic attacks. No matter that she is off-duty, no matter that there are those in the Met who would gladly see the back of her, Con can't shake her innate determination to bring the monsters responsible for this brutality to justice.
Borrow Nothing to Hide by James Oswald
Typically, such a step perfectly demonstrates synchronized elegance. It showcases a couple in near telepathic harmony with one another. It does not normally end with someone stone-dead in a lake. DS Declan Miller is a magnet for strange cases, but how can he catch a killer when the man confessing to the crime is clearly innocent? Things rapidly escalate when the murder that isn't really a murder at all attracts the unwanted attention of a drugs Queenpin, a deranged ex-squaddie and a lovesick gangland enforcer. Then a student is kidnapped... Throw in a wobbly dog, a pair of ceramic leopards and the distracting smell from a local biscuit factory, and - if he wants to save a young man's life - Miller has little choice but to waltz all the way into the shadows.
Borrow The Shadow Step by Mark Billingham
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home? Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
Borrow Land by Maggie O'Farrell
A killer is on the loose. The bodies are piling up. And Judith is hiding a deadly secret … Someone from Judith’s past has turned up in Marlow and is stirring up trouble. With all the murders that the Marlow Murder Club have had to solve and her work setting crosswords, Judith’s been too busy to give her old life much thought. But now it’s knocking on her door and won’t go away. On top of that, Marlow’s celebrities are getting murdered! When a footballer and a thriller writer are found dead, Judith, Suzie, and Becks must untangle a web of scandal to find the killer. But with Judith keeping secrets, the Marlow Murder Club find themselves drifting apart. The pressure is on in more ways than one … Can they find the killer and help Judith in time, or could this be the end of the Marlow Murder Club?
Borrow The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts by Robert Thorogood