JOY ELLIS THE TIMES AUDIOBOOK OF THE WEEK

Not only has Joy Ellis’s The Dying Light reached the No. 2 spot on the Bookseller’s eBook charts, but her latest outing for detective duo Jackman and Evans, They Disappeared, is The Times’ Audiobook of the Week! Read in Richard Armitage’s rich baritone, it’s not hard to understand why.

The setting is Ellis’s heartland, the haunting shores and lonely villages of the Lincolnshire Fens, which she conjures up with an immediacy born of deep understanding: Ellis lives in the Fens with her partner, whose former career in the police usefully informs the procedural side of her books. Her socially topical plotlines are made the more dramatic as she wastes no time on purple passages, is frugal on adverbs and strong on dialogue, something that Armitage evidently relishes.

They Disappeared will be out 30 November in eBook and paperback — till then, there’s audio!