Richard Armitage Audiobooks

Geneva: a thriller written and read by the voice behind Thorin Oakenshield

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.1/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is Richard Armitage?

Richard Armitage, born in 1971, is an English actor and author. British viewers first took proper notice of him as John Thornton in North and South in 2004; the wider world caught up when he played the dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of The Hobbit. In between and since have come Spooks, Strike Back, Hannibal, Berlin Station, Netflix’s The Stranger and an Olivier-nominated John Proctor in The Crucible at The Old Vic.

For our purposes, though, the career that matters is the one he conducts with his voice. That celebrated baritone has been at work since 2006, when, while filming Robin Hood, he was asked to record audiobooks for the show’s first season; narration for television, radio and adverts followed, along with voicing Trevor Belmont in Netflix’s Castlevania. Then the narrator turned novelist: his first crime thriller, Geneva, launched on Audible before Faber published it in print in October 2023, with The Cut following in 2025.

Richard Armitage in audiobooks

Geneva is the Armitage title in our catalogue, and it carries a distinction few debut thrillers can claim: it reached listeners on Audible before it ever reached print. That ordering tells you something about the author’s instincts. Armitage has spent the better part of two decades learning precisely how stories land in the ear, and a thriller written by a practised narrator arrives unusually well tuned for audio.

For UK listeners the appeal is straightforward: a homegrown screen star crossing into crime fiction on audio’s home turf. If you have ever wondered whether actors can really write, Geneva is a fair test case – and the arrival of a second thriller suggests he has every intention of staying.