Died in the Wool cover art

Died in the Wool

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Died in the Wool

By: Ngaio Marsh
Narrated by: James Saxon
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Ngaio Marsh returns to her New Zealand roots to transplant the classic country house murder mystery to an upland sheep station on South Island - and produces one of her most exotic and intriguing novels.

One summer evening in 1942, Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband’s wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech - and disappears.

Three weeks later she turns up at an auction – packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead....

©1945 Original Text of 1945 by Ngaio Marsh (P)2015 Hachette Audio Cosy Crime Thrillers Fiction Genre Fiction Military Mystery Suspense Thriller Thriller & Suspense Traditional Detectives War & Military Detective Crime

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A Man Lay Dead cover art
The Crime at Black Dudley cover art
The Ngaio Marsh BBC Radio Collection cover art
The Incredible Crime cover art
Inspector Alan Grant: The Full Collection cover art
Murder at Little Minton cover art
The White Cottage Mystery cover art
The Wintringham Mystery: Cicely Disappears cover art
These Names Make Clues cover art
Footsteps in the Dark cover art
A Quiet Life in the Country cover art
Mr Campion's Farewell cover art
The Affair of the Mutilated Mink cover art
Murder on the Lusitania cover art
A Hundred Thousand Dragons cover art
The Travelling Grave and Other Stories cover art

Critic reviews

"The brilliant Ngaio Marsh ranks with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers." ( Times Literary Supplement)
"In her ironic and witty hands the mystery novel can be civilized literature." ( New York Times)
"Ngaio Marsh is one of the detective novelists whose books I regularly re-read, always the test of a good detective story." (P. D. James)
"In the front rank of crime-story writers." ( The Times)
All stars
Most relevant
One of Ngaio Marsh's strongest whodunits set in New Zealand on a sheep ranch. A truly gruesome account of the hiding of the victim's body and a fantastic evocation of NZ in the forties.

James Saxon is the perfect narrator for the series.

Dipping into a mystery from the Golden Age

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Found this a fascinating listen - I appreciate the way Ngaio Marsh plays around with the conventions of the detective novel, with this starting out as a series of psychodramatic confessions from the central characters & then developing into gripping showdown - I stayed awake listening to the final two hours. I particularly loved the evocation of the NZ 'high country'& the thoughtful portrayal of character - brought impressively to life by James Saxon's narration - his NZ accents impeccable & the rendition of the taciturn Ben Wilson is a particular tour de force.

Slow burner; worth sticking with

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of the stories during WW2 which sees Roderick Alleyn across the world and away from his usual team and his wife Troy.. He patiently unravels the tortuous strands of the details of the last days of Flossie Rubrick MP whose decomposing body is found in a bale of wool from her homestead. He also seeks out the traitorous agent who is betraying his Country and the Scientific Advance which may help Britain and her Empire defeat the Axis Powers.. Love triangles and adolescent stubbornness threaten to hinder the investigation until at last the culprit is exposed. An enjoyable yarn.

Alleyn in NZ

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
enjoyed the story and the setting. characters are the usual marsh bunch but the setting provided a neat twist. the narration was patchy and even changed during the characters span making it difficult to follow in parts. dramatic but a little dated. however worth a go .

Australian spy thriller

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not my favourite Ngaio Marsh. I found it hard to distinguish between the voices of the male characters as spoken in a thick New Zealand accent. The first couple of hours or more felt like a play since no action but non-stop talk as the characters gave their impression of the character of the deceased. I also found it very hard to imagine the layout of the wool shed as it was alien to me and the description didn't help. I had suspected the identity of the murderer from the start but even if it had been someone else, I would not have cared. The narrator did a very good job considering the characters were wooden, unconvincing and unlikeable - even Alleyn - and the plot unbelievable and tedious.

Hard-going, weak plot

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews