Joy Ellis Audiobooks

The House of Mystery and DI Nikki Galena: Fenland crime with a devoted audio following

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

5,267 listener ratings

Who is Joy Ellis?

Some crime writers are made by their landscape. Joy Ellis is one of them: her novels belong to the flat, wide, faintly unnerving country of the Lincolnshire Fens, where a body can lie in a dyke for days and the horizon offers nowhere to hide.

She is English, prolific and, in audio, formidably popular. Three long-running series carry most of her reputation: the DI Nikki Galena books, the pairing of DI Jackman and DS Marie Evans, and the Detective Matt Ballard novels. In 2018 Audible named her Breakthrough Crime Writer of the Year, an award that confirmed what listeners had already worked out for themselves.

Her method is unfussy and effective. Procedure is respected, the teams are warm without ever turning cosy, and the plots turn on small human failures rather than criminal masterminds. Listen to a few and you notice how carefully she rations her horrors. That restraint is precisely why the shocks land.

Joy Ellis in audiobooks

It is the third Ellie McEwan case that carries Joy Ellis onto our shelves. In The House of Mystery, a healer who reads auras is called in when a conventional investigation stalls: a teenage boy’s body vanishes from a country road, two children begin producing knowledge they cannot possibly have, and the trail leads to an isolated mansion in the Surrey woods.

It is a clear departure from her Fenland police work and the most openly strange thing she has written, which may explain why so many listeners have piled in with ratings.

Sophie Rundle reads it, bringing an actor’s control to the quieter and eerier passages. Newcomers can start here without the earlier McEwan cases, though An Aura of Mystery opens the sequence properly. Explore the audiobooks below to see what is with us today.