The Suspect - Fiona Barton

Written by Fiona Barton
Read by Susan Duerden, Fiona Hardingham, Nicholas Guy Smith, Katharine McEwan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Series: Kate Waters, book 3
Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: January 22, 2019
Duration: 11:32:01

Twisting psychological suspense about every parent’s worst nightmare…

When two eighteen-year-old girls go missing in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight: desperate, bereft, and frantic with worry. What were the girls up to before they disappeared?

When the parents of 18-year-old Alexandra O’Connor, who’s backpacking in Thailand with an 18-year-old female friend, fail to hear from Alex after a week, they alert the police. Kate’s longtime police source, Det. Insp. Bob Sparkes, tells her about the two missing teenage girls, in the hope that Kate will write a story that “might winkle them out of whichever bar they’re sitting in.”

Kate keenly identifies with the concerned parents, since her estranged older son, Jake, has been in Thailand for the past two years after inexplicably dropping out of university. But what starts as a routine story soon proves otherwise, sending Kate and her journalistic friends/enemies to Thailand in search of answers. The exceedingly twisty tale that follows will test Kate, and her painfully conflicting loyalties, to the limit.

Roles come alive, each with its own narrator. Susan Duerden is the reporter; her BBC tone is broken up by adept accents for Thai and Dutch characters and the spiraling despair of a woman turned from an observer to a player. Fiona Hardingham gives the mother of a girl found dead in a dirty Thai hotel a fragile, exhausted misery spiked with fierce anger as the investigation grinds on with hideous pressure from the press. Nicholas Guy Smith voices the weary detective following up in England, and Katherine McEwan gives us the vulnerability and angst of victims in flashbacks. This one will keep you up at night. S.T.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2019