Born a Crime Trevor Noah’s childhood began with a crime – born of a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, the young lad risked being taken away by the Government simply for being the wrong colour. Growing up in South Africa in the latter days of apartheid and the unrestrained freedom that followed…
Category: Audiobook
‘The Invention of Murder’ by Judith Flanders
The Invention of Murder With its subtitle – ‘How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime’, this book traces the British public’s interest in murder as a sort of national entertainment. Though the book’s title clearly suggests we’re talking about the Victorian period (1837-1901), Ms Flanders begins her romp through the…
‘Zodiac’ by Robert Graysmith
Zodiac 1968 – a hooded mass murderer terrifies the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area with a series of apparently random and vicious killings. From his first teenage victims, shot dead in a lover’s lane, he goes on to kill at least six people, though the real figure could be as high as…
‘The Monster Collection’ by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Monster Collection (Audiobook) Audio presentation of three classic Gothic tales, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I read these books as a teenager, though the only one I actually remember reading is Dracula. Given the plethora of film and TV…
‘Labyrinth’ by Kate Mosse
Labyrinth (Audiobook) Carcassonne, 1209. When a young woman is given a mysterious book by her father, she begins a quest to uncover an ancient mystery – the secret of the true Grail. Twelve hundred years later, archaeology volunteer Alice Tanner finds two skeletons in a cave in the French Pyrenees. Realising there’s something familiar about…
‘The Murder of Harriet Monckton’ by Elizabeth Haynes
The Murder of Harriet Monckton November 1843. A young woman, 23-year-old Harriet Monckton, is found dead in the privy behind the chapel in Bromley, Kent. It appears she died from swallowing prussic acid, but when the autopsy reveals she was also six months pregnant, the community begin to wonder who might be responsible, and if…
‘Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World’ by Niall Ferguson
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World For years the imperial red of the British was splattered over vast areas of the world, including America, Asia and Africa. But how did a tiny island manage to take on almost the entire planet? I bought both the hardback and audio versions of this fabulous book so…
‘Refusal’ by Felix Francis
Refusal Six years after investigator Sid Halley’s retirement, a request from racing authority chairman Sir Richard Stewart looks like pushing Sid back into the sleuthing game. But the former jockey-turned-detective has no desire to revive a line of work that got him shot, beaten up and thrown in the path of danger on a regular…
‘Heist’ by Howard Sounes
Heist (Audiobook) In February 2006, an unlikely gang of would-be villains stole £53 million from a cash warehouse in Tonbridge, Kent. Rocketing the caper into the annals of British crimes such as the Great Train Robbery, the theft was audacious in its premise and, at times, positively farcical in its execution. Subtitled ‘The True Story…
‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist Brought up in the workhouse, orphan Oliver escapes to London and finds himself caught in Fagin’s criminal underworld. Everyone knows the basic plot of this classic tale, but I was surprised to learn how much of it was new to me. It turns out that the many film and TV versions rarely do…
