Sally Rigby Audiobooks

Northampton gave Sally Rigby her first accent and her first ambitions; magazines and radio gave her a career, and a long spell lecturing in further and higher education gave her the discipline to plot. A considerable detour followed, through Manchester and London and then out to New Zealand and Australia, before she settled back in Britain, in Winchester, to write crime full time.

Her signature is the investigative double act. In the Cavendish and Walker novels she pairs a driven detective chief inspector with a forensic psychologist; in the Detective Sebastian Clifford books she sets a disgraced former Metropolitan officer alongside the irrepressible Lucinda ‘Birdie’ Bird; in the Cornwall Murder Mystery series she moves that formula to the cliffs and coves of the far south west. The pleasure lies in the friction between two people who read the same evidence differently.

She writes fast, clean, plot-forward prose in the mainstream British procedural tradition, with a good ear for the market towns and county lanes where her bodies tend to turn up. Comfort listening, but with teeth.

Web of Lies is the sensible door in, since it introduces Clifford and Birdie from scratch and Jonathan Keeble narrates with exactly the dry, unhurried authority the pair need. Keeble carries the series, and his reading of Twist of Fate, the best rated Rigby audiobook we hold, shows why: a later case about a theft ring working the grand estates of Leicestershire, and it still plays perfectly well on its own.

For the Cavendish and Walker strand, Deadly Games is your sample, with Clare Corbett giving Whitney Walker a brisk, no-nonsense edge. Corbett also reads The Bones of Logan Rock, which takes the Cornish coast as its stage and is too new to have gathered listener ratings yet.

An omnibus of the first three Clifford cases is on its way here too, so anyone who prefers to binge can watch for it. Browse the titles below and pick your detective.