The Retreat

One year ago Alex Towne's body was found. One month ago his mother saw him on the street. One week ago David Raker agreed to look for him. Now he wishes he hadn't. Mary Towne's son, Alex, went missing six years ago. Five years later he finally turned up - as a corpse in a car wreck. Missing persons investigator David Raker doesn't want the work: it's clearly a sad but hopeless case of mistaken identity brought to him by a woman unable to let go of her son.

All she wanted was the truth, but she'll wish she never found out. When Catherine wakes up alone one morning, she thinks her husband has gone for a run before work. But Simon never makes it to the office. His running shoes are by the front door. Nothing is missing - except him.

Moments before she dies, Nicola's grandmother Betty whispers to her that there are babies at the bottom of the garden. Nicola's mother claims she was talking nonsense. However, when Nicola's daughter finds a bone while playing in Betty's garden, it's clear that something sinister has taken place.

He said in sickness and in health. But after Vicki was attacked at work and left suffering with epilepsy, her husband, Daniel, left her for his mistress. So when Vicki gets a call one day to say that he's gone missing, her first thought is 'good riddance'. But then the police find evidence suggesting that Daniel is dead. And they think Vicki had something to do with it. What really happened on the night of Daniel's disappearance? And how can Vicki prove her innocence when she's not even sure of it herself?

The million-copy best-selling author returns with a breathtaking thriller. The disappearance. The suspicion. The fear....

When she's not digging up bones or other ancient objects, Ruth Galloway lectures at the University of North Norfolk. She lives happily alone in a remote place called Saltmarsh overlooking the North Sea and, for company; she has her cats Flint and Sparky, and Radio 4. When a child's bones are found in the marshes near an ancient site that Ruth worked on ten years earlier, Ruth is asked to date them.

Husband and wife Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane co-own Ranish Tweed: a Hebridean company that weaves its own special variety of Harris cloth, which has become a sought-after brand in the world of high fashion. But when Niamh learns of Ruairidh's affair with Russian designer Irina Vetrov, then witnesses the pair killed by a car bomb in Paris, her life is left in ruins. Along with her husband's remains, she returns home to the Isle of Lewis bereft.

The Bird children have an idyllic childhood: a picture-book cottage in a country village, a warm, cosy kitchen filled with love and laughter, sun-drenched afternoons in a rambling garden. But one Easter weekend a tragedy strikes the Bird family that is so devastating it tears them apart. Many years later something will call them home, back to the house they grew up in - and to what really happened that Easter weekend all those years ago.

Introducing Audible's Thriller of the Year: Silent Child by Sarah A. Denzil, performed by Joanne Froggatt. In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son's red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river, and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life...until Aiden returns.

Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee - a girl who inherited her mother's bright-blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt, and Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to hold someone accountable. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

Inspired by the work of Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill and set in a crumbling country mansion, The Silent Companions is an unsettling Victorian gothic ghost story that will send a shiver down the spine.... Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge. With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks.

Loveday Cardew prefers books to people, and her job in a York bookshop is her refuge. If you look carefully, you might see the first lines of the novels she loves the most tattooed on her skin, but there are secrets Loveday will never share. Into the bookshop come a poet, a lover, a friend and three mysterious deliveries, each of which stirs unsettling memories she wants to forget. Turning the pages of her past will be the hardest thing Loveday has ever done. Can she trust those around her?

We're all animals...although some of us have more primal instincts than others. Ex-policeman Joe Cassidy has a keen interest in animal behaviour and how it can have a bearing on some of the most heinous of human crimes - a talent that has heavily informed his detective work over the years. Although until now, he thought that he had left detective work behind....

Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a secret file on a train, blown surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations – the slow horses – and bitterest among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.

Rosie Strange doesn't believe in ghosts or witches or magic. It's no surprise therefore that when she inherits the ramshackle Essex Witch Museum, her first thought is to take the money and run. Still, the museum exerts a curious pull over Rosie. There's the eccentric academic who bustles in to demand she help in a hunt for the bones of the notorious Ursula Cadence, a witch long since put to death. And there's curator Sam Stone, a man about whom Rosie can't decide if he's tiresomely annoying or extremely captivating.