Clare Mackintosh Audiobooks

It's Not What You Think: a former police inspector at the top of British suspense

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.8/5 average

58 listener ratings

Who is Clare Mackintosh?

Twelve years in Thames Valley Police gave Clare Mackintosh the raw material most crime writers have to imagine. She read French and Management at Royal Holloway, joined the force on graduating, and rose to town sergeant at Chipping Norton and then operations inspector for Oxfordshire, handling public order, CID work and the family liaison duties that put her in living rooms on the worst day of someone’s life. She left the police in 2011 to write full time.

Her debut, I Let You Go, arrived in 2014, took a Richard and Judy Book Club slot and went on to win the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Its seed was a real Oxford hit and run she attended early in her service, and that instinct has shaped everything since: she writes about ordinary people caught in the machinery of an investigation rather than detectives chasing masterminds.

She founded the Chipping Norton Literary Festival, wrote a column for Cotswold Life and now lives in North Wales. Her novels are translated widely and sell in the millions.

Clare Mackintosh in audiobooks

The headline here is It’s Not What You Think, and it is a proper showcase for what audio can do. Nadeeka comes home to confront a partner she believes is lying to her and finds a crime scene instead, a set-up that Mackintosh unspools across shifting points of view. The recording runs to eleven and a half hours and leans on a full cast, with Richard Armitage leading a company that includes Samuel Barnett, Tuppence Middleton and Vineeta Rishi.

Armitage in particular knows how to hold a lie inside a voice, which is exactly the register this story needs. Listeners have rated it warmly, and it is the natural entry point if you are new to her: no prior reading required, a single sitting’s worth of tension stretched over a couple of commutes.

Press play on the title below and see how long you manage to hold on to your theory.