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6 of the Best Crime Audiobooks To Lose Yourself In

By Lucy Cleland

4 years ago

The perfect form of escapism

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We’re addicted to crime – whether it’s real life or fantasy. Here are five thrillers to lose hours and hours in…

6 Of The Best Crime Audiobooks To Lose Yourself In

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Deep South is the setting for Tartt’s second doorstopper, written 10 years after The Secret History (another humdinger). Here the story hinges on the unsolved murder of a young white boy who was found hanging on a tree. Ten years later it is his sister, Harriet, a baby at the time of his death who sets out to discover what happened – her investigations take her and her accomplice across both class and racial divides. You can almost hear the cicadas humming in heat and tension. 24 hours. Audible

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

If you prefer your crime dramas that little bit cosier, Richard ‘Pointless’ Osman’s first novel, set in a retirement village, will fit the bill perfectly. With Marian Keyes and Lesley Manville joining Richard himself as narrators, as the eighty-year-old amateur supersleuths, helping to solve the rest real-life crime that has crossed their path. Cosy and comic it may be, but it’s also a cracking whodunnit. 12 hours. Audible

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

Written by a screenwriter (you can tell how brilliantly it would translate to the big screen), Terry Hayes’ first novel is a page-turner par excellence. Pitting the brilliant, nameless US spy ‘Pilgrim’ against an equally determined and intelligent Jihadi terrorist who has ambitious plans to unleash a deadly plague (hmmmm – a bit too close to home maybe) for which no vaccine can ever be developed – leads readers in a peripatetic dance of cat and mouse. 22 hours. Audible

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

You’ll have come across endless thumbed, dirty copies of this noughties belter in various pitstop hotels, hostels and book exchanges around the world. Much safer nowadays to enjoy this true-life rollercoaster of a book that starts from a jail break in Australia and rolls through to the underbelly of India through your earphones. Shantaram may be at times unbelievable – even if author asserts otherwise – but it’s seat of your pants storytelling. 43 hours. Audible

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

From the first page where an atrocity so unspeakable has befallen the protagonist and her eight-year-old son, one of last year’s biggest fiction releases has you rooting for this brave, gutsy mother as she navigates life on the run from the Mexican cartel and crossing the border into the US. It’s courted controversy for Cummins’ right to tell the story of illegal immigration as a white woman, something she has wrestled with and addressed publically, but as a gripping tale of a mother’s love for her son, it’s completely absorbing. 17 hours. Audible

The Distant Echo by Val McDermid

Read in a lilting Scottish accent by Tom Cotcher, from the moment the four university students stumble across the dying body of a local barmaid in the early hours of a freezing winter morning, you are swept up in this psychological thriller that spans 25 years. Unable to find enough evidence to convict any of the students, the case turns cold until it’s later reopened in a review. When two of the four friends later meet their own suspicious demise, the whole nightmare which never really left them is brought to a terrifying conclusion. Perfect crime prose – with a killer twist in the tail – awaits. 14 hours. Audible

Featured Image: Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

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6 Of The Best Crime Audiobooks To Lose Yourself In

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

The Distant Echo by Val McDermid

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