Alex Scarrow Audiobooks

DCI Boyd and TimeRiders: crime in Hastings, time travel more or less everywhere else

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is Alex Scarrow?

Rock guitarist, graphic artist, computer games designer, novelist. Alex Scarrow reached fiction by the scenic route. Born in Norwich in 1966 and still based there, he spent a decade chasing a record deal that never arrived, designed games for a living, and only then turned to the keyboard that stuck.

Adult thrillers came first, among them A Thousand Suns and Last Light, before he found a very large teenage readership with TimeRiders, a nine-book run about three young people plucked out of their own deaths to police the timeline. It is properly plotted science fiction that never talks down to its readers, and it made his name in school libraries across Britain.

In recent years he has come back to crime for grown-ups with the DCI Boyd novels, set in Hastings and built on ordinary police graft rather than flashes of genius. Readers of his brother, the historical novelist Simon Scarrow, will recognise the same appetite for pace.

Alex Scarrow in audiobooks

The Fool arrives well into the DCI Boyd sequence rather than at its start, which is worth knowing before you begin. Boyd is by this point a grandfather running an understaffed CID, and part of the story decamps to Florida on a lucrative private contract while the trouble at home refuses to keep.

Aubrey Parsons narrates, and his reading suits the series exactly: measured, unshowy, a Sussex procedural given room to tick along. Just under eight hours, which is about right for a police novel that prefers to accumulate rather than explode.

If Boyd is new to you, the earlier cases fill in the household and the office politics, but the plot here stands perfectly well on its own. The listing sits below.