Heather Burnside Audiobooks

The Nanny: a domestic thriller with the danger already inside the house

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

226 listener ratings

Who is Heather Burnside?

The Nanny belongs to a strain of British crime writing that keeps its horrors indoors. Heather Burnside works the domestic thriller, where the threat is not a stranger in an alley but somebody invited in, trusted with the children and handed a key to the front door.

The appeal of the form is its ordinariness. Everything that goes wrong could plausibly go wrong in any household, which is what gives the genre its grip, and the writing here is built for momentum rather than atmosphere: short chapters, steady escalation, and a plot that keeps a firm hand on the listener’s suspicions.

Heather Burnside in audiobooks

Sara Griffiths narrates, at a shade over seven hours, close to ideal for a thriller of this kind. The pace is one of the pleasures, and a longer running time would only work against the tension the story spends its first half building.

A couple of hundred listeners have rated it warmly, a good showing for a recent release and a fair indication that the twists land where they are meant to. If domestic suspense is your shelf, this is a clean and efficient example of it. Everything under this name sits below.