Audiobooks by Ruth Rendell

Alan Groombridge had a fantasy. Husband to a woman he didn't like, father of two children he had never wanted,and manager of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank in the country, Alan was doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine.All that saved him was that one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom -one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day there was no more dreaming and no more games.The Anglian-Victoria bank was robbed and both manager and cashier disappeared.ln place of the dull and dreary repetit!on that had once existed, there came a brutal, chilling nightmare that might never, never end.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Ric Jerrom (Narrator)

Audiobook

Harm Done: A New Inspector Wexford Mystery

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police and her family and neighbors had already begun to search for her body. She had been missing for three days. Never an articulate child, between her confusion and amnesia she could not plausibly describe where she'd been or why she'd been away. Soon after, a convicted pedophile is released back into the community, adding to the already heightened fears of parents in the Muriel Campden Estate where he lives. Then the child of a wealthy executive disappears, and not long after, a suspect in the kidnapping is found stabbed to death. Chief Inspector Wexford is charged with solving the mysterious disappearances, protecting a pedophile, and catching a killer. As he searches for connections, he finds himself focusing on domestic violence. His daughter, Sylvia, a social worker, has come to work nearby in a refuge for battered women called The Hide. Her marriage is also strained, although her husband has never raised a hand to her. Others in Kingsmarkham are not so fortunate. As Wexford moves closer to the truth, he confronts the discomfiting lesson that when it comes to the inner life of families, justice is rarely as straightforward as the letter of the law.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Christopher Ravenscroft (Narrator)

Audiobook

The St. Zita Society

From three-time Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Ruth Rendell comes a captivating and expertly plotted tale of residents and servants on one block of a posh London street-and the deadly ways their lives intertwine. Life in the well-manicured London locale of Hexam Place is not as placid and orderly as it appears. Behind the tranquil gardens and polished entryways, relationships between servants and their employers are set to combust. Henry, the handsome valet to Lord Studley, is sleeping with both the Lord's wife and his university-age daughter. Montserrate, the Still family's lazy au pair, is helping to hide Mrs. Still's illicit affair with a television actor-for a small fee. June, the haughty housekeeper to a princess of dubious origin, is hard at work forming a "society" for servants to address complaints about their employers. Meanwhile, a disturbed gardener, Dex, believes a voice in his cellphone is giving him godlike instructions-that could endanger the lives of all who reside in Hexam Place. A deeply observed and suspenseful update to the upstairs/downstairs genre, The St. Zita Society is Ruth Rendall at her incisive best.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Carole Boyd (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Lake Of Darkness

Martin Urban is a quiet bachelor with a comfortable life, free of worry and distractions. When he unexpectedly comes into a small fortune, he decides to use his newfound wealth to help out those in need. Finn also leads a quiet life, and comes into a little money of his own. Normally, their paths would never have crossed. But Martin's ideas about who should benefit from his charitable impulses yield some unexpected results, and soon the good intentions of the one become fatally entangled with the mercenary nature of the other. In the Lake of Darkness, Ruth Rendell takes the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished to a startling, haunting conclusion.

Ruth Rendell (Author), David Suchet (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Bridesmaid / Going Wrong

Love and death are the principal players in these two BBC Radio full-cast dramatisations of chilling Ruth Rendell stories. In 'The Bridesmaid', when Philip embarks on an affair with Senta, his sister's bridesmaid, she reminds him of the stone statue he adored as a child. Yet Senta is married, and Philip's overwhelming aversion to violence leads indirectly to murder and horror as he is drawn into erotic but murderous complicity. Starring Jamie Glover and Rachel Lewis. In 'Going Wrong', natural born villain Guy Curran has youth, good looks and charm, but not the one thing he longs for: Leonora, the sophisticated girl he has loved since childhood. When Guy learns that she's about to get married, his growing obsession convinces him that if Leonora can't be his, nor can she be anyone else's - ever. Starring Peter Wingfield and Oona Beeson.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Full Cast, Jamie Glover, Oona Beeson, Peter Wingfield, Rachel Lewis (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Judgement In Stone

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles - died in the space of fifteen minutes on the 14th February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later she was arrested for the crime. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there...

Ruth Rendell (Author), Carole Hayman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Not in the Flesh

A new Chief Inspector Wexford mystery from the author who Time magazine has called "the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world." When the truffle-hunting dog starts to dig furiously, his master's first reaction is delight at the size of the clump the dog has unearthed: at the going rate, this one truffle might be worth several hundred pounds. Then the dirt falls away to reveal not a precious mushroom but the bones and tendons of what is clearly a human hand. In Not in the Flesh, Chief Inspector Wexford tries to piece together events that took place eleven years earlier, a time when someone was secretly interred in a secluded patch of English countryside. Now Wexford and his team will need to interrogate everyone who lives nearby to see if they can turn up a match for the dead man among the eighty-five people in this part of England who have disappeared over the past decade. Then, when a second body is discovered nearby, Wexford experiences a feeling that's become a rarity for the veteran policeman: surprise. As Wexford painstakingly moves to resolve these multiple mysteries, long-buried secrets are brought to daylight, and Ruth Rendell once again proves why she has been hailed as our greatest living mystery writer.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Girl Next Door: A Novel

In this psychologically explosive story from "one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation" (People), the discovery of bones in a tin box sends shockwaves across a group of long-time friends.In the waning months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. Throughout the summer of 1944-until one father forbids it-the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female. As the discovery makes national news, the friends come together once again, to recall their days in the tunnel for the detective investigating the case. Is the truth buried among these aging friends and their memories? This impromptu reunion causes long-simmering feelings to bubble to the surface. Alan, stuck in a passionless marriage, begins flirting with Daphne, a glamorous widow. Michael considers contacting his estranged father, who sent Michael to live with an aunt after his mother vanished in 1944. Lewis begins remembering details about his Uncle James, an army private who once accompanied the children into the tunnels, and who later disappeared. In The Girl Next Door Rendell brilliantly shatters the assumptions about age, showing that the choices people make-and the emotions behind them-remain as potent in late life as they were in youth.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Ric Jerrom (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Best Man to Die

Ruth Rendell (Author), Davina Porter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Classic Crime Short Stories

Discover a world of heroes and villains, suspense and intrigue. This riveting and comprehensive collection brings together some of the best crime writing of all time. Ruth Rendell and Frances Hegarty spearhead the modern genre, moving through the popular and rarely recorded Graham Greene, to Edgar Wallace and G.K. Chesterton and his master detective Father Brown. And that's not all. You can find the following on this title: "Loopy", "The Missing Romney", "Insufficient Evidence", The Compleat Criminal", "The Case for the Defence", "Markheim", "The Blue Cross", "Bluebeard's Bathtub", "Nine Point of the Law", "Arsene Lupin in Prison". This collection includes stories from Ruth Rendell, Frances Hegarty, E.W. Hornung, Graham Greene, Margery Allingham, Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, Maurice Leblanc, Edgar Wallace, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Graham Greene, Maurice Leblanc, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell (Author), Jack Shepherd, Patrick Malahide (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dark Corners

A spectacularly compelling story of blackmail, accidental murders, and of one life's fateful unraveling from Ruth Rendell-"one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation" (People)-writing at her absolute best.When his father dies, Carl Martin, a philosophy graduate and struggling novelist, inherits a house in a trendy London neighborhood. Carl needs cash, however, so he rents the upstairs room and kitchen to the first person he interviews, Dermot McKinnon. That was colossal mistake number one. Mistake number two was keeping his father's bizarre collection of homeopathic "cures" that he found in the medicine cabinet, including a stash of controversial diet pills. Mistake number three was selling fifty of those diet pills to a friend, who is then found dead. Now Dermot seizes a nefarious opportunity and begins to blackmail Carl, followed by his refusal to pay rent, and a truly creepy invasion of Carl's space. Ingeniously weaving together two storylines that finally merge in one shocking turn, Ruth Rendell describes one man's spiral into darkness-and murder-as he falls victim to a diabolical foe he cannot escape. This is masterful storytelling that gets under your skin, brilliant psychological suspense from Ruth Rendell.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Ric Jerrom (Narrator)

Audiobook

Master Of The Moor

Stephen Whalby loves to walk the moor. It is a dark and forbidding place, but it is his. When the body of a young blonde woman is found there, her face horrifically disfigured, the victim of a merciless murderer, his beloved moor is tainted with suspicion and terror. Then a second woman goes missing on the moor and Stephen watches as the search party make their way across the treacherous murder scene. Not to be usurped by a killer or a victim; he, and only he, is the master of the moor.

Ruth Rendell (Author), Michael Bryant (Narrator)

Audiobook