Clara’s Verdict
Cuthbert’s Way is where LJ Ross pays off the promise she made in The Shrine, and the seventeenth DCI Ryan mystery is the richer for the patience. The premise is beautifully simple and quietly audacious: the cross Ryan was celebrated for recovering is a fake, the real prize is still out there, and the answer lies not in modern policing but in a secret kept for a thousand years.
I have a soft spot for crime novels that borrow the shape of a treasure hunt, and Ross sends her detective across the wild borderlands on the trail of a long-dead saint with obvious relish. Some readers noticed the story leaning further into romance and away from strict procedure, and your response will depend on how much you come to these books for the characters. I found the human warmth to be the point rather than a distraction.
This is comfort reading with a genuine sense of landscape and history, the literary equivalent of a long walk in good company across difficult, lovely country.
There is a gentleness to this instalment that some hardened crime readers may resist, but I found it disarming. Ross seems less interested here in shocking us than in deepening the bonds between her characters, and the treasure-hunt structure gives her the room to do exactly that. The stakes are high on paper, yet the mood is closer to adventure than to menace, and the result is a book that feels like a reward for loyalty rather than a test of nerves.
About the Audiobook
The seventeenth title in The DCI Ryan Mysteries, Cuthbert’s Way turns on a secret kept for a thousand years. After the dramatic theft from Durham Cathedral, the world believes Ryan and his team recovered Saint Cuthbert’s cross and returned it home. Ryan alone knows the recovered cross was a fake, which means their troubles are only beginning.
Just as the team start to unravel the truth behind the thefts, something even more priceless is stolen, something that can never be replaced. As a nationwide manhunt stalls, Ryan realises the solution lies in an age-old secret known to a chosen few. To recover what has been lost he must crack Cuthbert’s Code and follow the trail of the saint across the unpredictable hills and valleys of the borderlands, in a whodunit still peppered with romance and humour and set against the spectacular Northumbrian landscape.
The Narration
At a little over seven hours this is a more expansive listen, and Jonathan Keeble uses the extra room well. The quest structure gives him passages of landscape and legend to voice alongside the usual squad-room exchanges, and he shades the historical and religious material with a hushed reverence that never becomes solemn.
Keeble’s great strength across this series is continuity of character, and here he lets the personal relationships carry real emotional weight as the case turns closer to home. His pacing suits a story that is part manhunt and part pilgrimage, patient in the quiet stretches and taut when the trail heats up.
Keeble’s reverence for the historical and religious material never curdles into stiffness, and he keeps the human comedy of the squad room alive alongside the legend of the saint. The longer runtime lets him breathe, and the passages that play like a pilgrimage across the borderlands benefit most from his unhurried, storytelling calm. It is a reading that trusts the listener to enjoy the journey as much as the destination, which suits a book built around a long, winding trail.
What Readers Say
Cuthbert’s Way holds an average of 4.5 stars from 43 ratings. Kerry Parsons, a self-declared massive fan, gave five stars and loved it, describing the series as a comfort and the characters as old friends she feels she personally knows. JenMedBookLover, also five stars, welcomed the way the case turns personal for Ryan and appreciated how cleanly it concludes the thread begun in The Shrine.
A Geordie reader, Rebecca Bennett, delighted in the north-east settings coming to life around her own recollections, while an eighty-three-year-old reviewer wrote movingly that Ross draws out emotions he never knew he had. The one four-star note came from a reader who enjoyed the book despite feeling it leaned more into romance than police work. The affection in these reviews is unmistakable.
The most touching response came from that eighty-three-year-old listener, who wrote that anyone unmoved by Ross’s writing must have a heart of stone. It is an extravagant claim, but the sheer warmth behind it captures something real about the hold this series has on its readers, a devotion that reaches well beyond the mechanics of any single plot. Across the reviews, the words that recur are comfort, friends and home, which tells you a great deal about what people come here for.
Who Should Listen?
Cuthbert’s Way is ideal for listeners who love a mystery wrapped around history and landscape, and especially for those who have followed the Cuthbert thread and want its resolution. It rewards series loyalty more than it courts newcomers. If a thousand-year-old secret and a chase across the borderlands sound like your sort of thing, you can Listen to Cuthbert’s Way on Audible and set out on the trail.
