K. L. Slater Audiobooks

A creative writing MA at forty is not the usual route onto bestseller lists. K. L. Slater took it anyway, returning to Nottingham Trent University as a mature student and leaving with five offers of representation from London agents before she had even graduated.

She signed with Bookouture in 2016 and has written psychological thrillers at a formidable pace ever since, selling millions of copies worldwide. She still lives in Nottingham, and her fiction rarely strays far from that kind of ordinary English street: semi-detached houses, school runs, neighbours who wave every morning and know nothing whatsoever about each other.

Her particular gift is domestic dread. A Slater novel usually begins with something small and wrong, a lie about a job, a stranger who is too helpful, a husband whose story does not quite hold, and tightens from there in short chapters designed to make stopping difficult. Recent years have also made her a fixture of Audible’s original programming, where her plotting suits the format exactly.

Slater is well represented on our shelves, and the ratings cluster tightly, which tells you how consistent she is. Missing, read by Kristin Atherton, is among the best rated here and makes a clean starting point.

Clare Corbett narrates a whole run of the others and has become something close to Slater’s audio signature: The Narrator, an Audible Original, then The Married Man and My Husband Next Door, both quietly vicious on the subject of marriage. Husband and Wife and The Girlfriend are scheduled to join them.

Her hospitality thrillers, The Chef with Annabel Scholey and The Waitress with Claudia Jessie, divide listeners far more sharply, so try those once you know whether her style suits you. Browse the audiobooks below to choose your first.