
The Secret House of Death
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $15.17
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Simon Russell Beale
-
By:
-
Ruth Rendell
About this listen
Louise North doesn't care what the neighbors think. She lets her lover leave his car just outside her house in broad daylight, telling everyone he is a central heating salesman. Still, it's a shock when she's found shot dead, covered by the equally dead body of the "salesman."
It was his third visit to the gloomy house on Orchard Drive. Each time, he parked in the same place. Each time, he carried a briefcase. And each time, Louise North greeted him at the door.... Susan Townsend was the only resident with no interest in the affair going on next door, or in the neighbourhood gossip about it. Yet when Susan finds Louise shot dead, underneath the equally dead body of her lover, it is Susan who must help Louise’s husband, Bob, to get back on his feet. But is she really a helpful neighbor or, a murderer?
©1968 Ruth Rendell (P)2014 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Killing Doll
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No one would have described Manningtree Grove as fashionable. Few would have found it especially interesting. But it was not an unpleasant place to live: the old railway line lay in a valley, and the gardens looked onto it. It was the kind of place where nothing ever happened. Yet it was here that Peter Yearman first sold his soul to the devil....
-
-
sutch good fantasy story
- By Marianne on 10-03-24
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
-
-
Mystery with humor and insight
- By Ida Hagman on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Make Death Love Me
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alan Groombridge had a fantasy. Husband to a woman he didn't like, father of two children he had never wanted,and manager of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank in the country, Alan was doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine.All that saved him was that one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom -one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day there was no more dreaming and no more games.
-
-
Missing the last chapter!
- By JC on 01-26-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Heartstones
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Alexandra O’Karma
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few mystery writers can match Ruth Rendell’s ability to get inside the dark, tangled psyches of everyday criminals. Rendell takes a single emotion - in this case a sister’s all-consuming jealousy - and shows how even the most unsuspicious people are capable of the worst kind of horrors.
-
-
Loved the ending!
- By Maria Ivek on 02-27-25
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Thirteen Steps Down
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.
-
-
As always, Rendell writes a very engaging yarn!
- By nina on 05-06-16
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Talking to Strange Men
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but these agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play. Not that John Creevey knows this. To him, the messages he decodes with painstaking care are the communications of dangerous and evil men, and as he comes face to face with the fact of his beloved wife Jennifer's defection, he begins to see a way to get back at the man she left him for.
-
-
Wonderful narrator Wonderful writing
- By Shirlie M. Slater on 08-28-19
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Killing Doll
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No one would have described Manningtree Grove as fashionable. Few would have found it especially interesting. But it was not an unpleasant place to live: the old railway line lay in a valley, and the gardens looked onto it. It was the kind of place where nothing ever happened. Yet it was here that Peter Yearman first sold his soul to the devil....
-
-
sutch good fantasy story
- By Marianne on 10-03-24
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
-
-
Mystery with humor and insight
- By Ida Hagman on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Make Death Love Me
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alan Groombridge had a fantasy. Husband to a woman he didn't like, father of two children he had never wanted,and manager of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank in the country, Alan was doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine.All that saved him was that one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom -one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day there was no more dreaming and no more games.
-
-
Missing the last chapter!
- By JC on 01-26-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Heartstones
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Alexandra O’Karma
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few mystery writers can match Ruth Rendell’s ability to get inside the dark, tangled psyches of everyday criminals. Rendell takes a single emotion - in this case a sister’s all-consuming jealousy - and shows how even the most unsuspicious people are capable of the worst kind of horrors.
-
-
Loved the ending!
- By Maria Ivek on 02-27-25
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Thirteen Steps Down
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.
-
-
As always, Rendell writes a very engaging yarn!
- By nina on 05-06-16
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Talking to Strange Men
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but these agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play. Not that John Creevey knows this. To him, the messages he decodes with painstaking care are the communications of dangerous and evil men, and as he comes face to face with the fact of his beloved wife Jennifer's defection, he begins to see a way to get back at the man she left him for.
-
-
Wonderful narrator Wonderful writing
- By Shirlie M. Slater on 08-28-19
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Best Man to Die
- An Inspector Wexford Mystery
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be the prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? And Charlie's death was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women. Now Chief Inspector Wexford and his assistant join forces with the groom to track down a killer....
-
-
Classic who-dunnit
- By Kathi on 02-24-13
By: Ruth Rendell
-
A Demon in My View
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Julian Glover
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a gloomy cellar, the figure of a beautiful, pale woman makes no move when the man advances on her from the shadows, puts his hands around her neck and strangles her. Arthur Johnson is a mild-mannered, shy man who has never known how to talk to women. His resulting loneliness has twisted his yearning for love and respect into a carefully constructed predilection for violence and control.
-
-
Totally a Ruth Rendell read
- By Dottie B. on 08-08-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
One Across, Two Down
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Nicky Henson
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There are only two things in life that interest Stanley: solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law’s money. For 20 years, the puzzles have been his only pleasure, the money his only dream. It has never occurred to Stanley that his mother-in-law would try to outsmart him and the money would never be his. Until now. It is only now that Stanley, so clever at misleading double meanings and devious clues, decides to construct a puzzle of his own - and so give death a helping hand.
-
-
Fantastic!
- By Suzanne fox on 03-09-18
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Crocodile Bird
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Liza is raised in a remote rural hamlet. One evening, Liza’s mother orders her to leave home forever. Paralyzed at having to fend for herself, Liza finds refuge with Sean, a drifter with whom she begins to share the bizarre story of her life.
-
-
Spooky, fantastic, amazing.
- By Newenglander18 on 12-05-13
By: Ruth Rendell
-
Portobello
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Tim Curry
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ruth Rendell is widely considered to be crime fiction’s reigning queen. In Portobello, she delivers a captivating and intricate tale that weaves together the troubled lives of several people in the gentrified neighborhood of London’s Notting Hill. Walking to the shops one day, 50-year-old Eugene Wren discovers an envelope on the street bulging with cash. A man plagued by a shameful addiction - and his own good intentions - Wren hatches a plan to find the money’s rightful owner.
-
-
Portobello's Lovely Mean Streets
- By Lynn on 09-16-10
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Girl Next Door
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the waning months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. Throughout the summer of 1944 - until one father forbids it - the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female.
-
-
Kept unfolding more twists and turns
- By Happy Helena on 02-08-15
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Rottweiler
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Nigel Anthony
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first girl had a bite mark on her neck, but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler' and the name stuck. The latest murder takes place very near Inez Ferry's antique shop in Marylebone. When the Rottweiler’s trinkets start showing up in the shop, suddenly, everyone Inez knows is a suspect, and the killer feels all too close.
-
-
Lots of atmosphere, and a Freudian mystery.
- By Sparkly on 11-03-12
By: Ruth Rendell
-
The Minotaur
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel. A young nurse fresh out of school, Kerstin has been hired for a position with the Cosway family, residents of the Hall for generations. She is soon introduced to her "charge", John Cosway, a 39-year-old man whose strange behavior is vaguely explained by his mother and sisters as part of the madness that runs in the family.
-
-
Top notch Barbara Vine
- By Susan B. on 12-12-07
By: Barbara Vine
-
The Complete George Smiley Radio Dramas
- BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: full cast, Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 18 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The complete collection of acclaimed BBC Radio dramas based on John le Carré's best-selling novels, starring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley. With a star cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Brian Cox, Ian MacDiarmid, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Bonneville and Lindsay Duncan, these enthralling dramatisations perfectly capture the atmosphere of le Carré's taut, thrilling spy novels.
-
-
good reading but can't navigate
- By RB Vancouver on 01-07-17
By: John le Carré
-
The Cuckoo's Calling
- By: Robert Galbraith
- Narrated by: Robert Glenister
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, creditors are calling, and after a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, he’s living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with a shocking story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry - known to her friends as the Cuckoo - famously fell to her death a few months earlier.
-
-
Unbelievable debut mystery set in London
- By Tracey on 05-26-13
By: Robert Galbraith
-
No Night Is Too Long
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings, Shelley Thomson, Samuel West
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tim Cornish thought he'd gotten away with murder. For months after he'd killed his lover off the Alaskan coast, there hadn't been a word. But then the letters started to arrive. It seems that someone knows what Tim has done.... This compelling thriller delivers such a dark picture of romantic love that murder seems its natural mate. Frightening, suspenseful, and deeply unsettling, No Night Is Too Long is a modern crime masterpiece and will be enjoyed by readers of P. D. James and Ian Rankin.
-
-
Well done
- By SB on 03-30-22
By: Barbara Vine
-
Needful Things
- By: Stephen King
- Narrated by: Stephen King
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leland Gaunt opens a new shop in Castle Rock called Needful Things. Anyone who enters his store finds the object of his or her lifelong dreams and desires: a prized baseball card, a healing amulet. In addition to a token payment, Gaunt requests that each person perform a little "deed", usually a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from town. These practical jokes cascade out of control, and soon the entire town is doing battle with itself. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn suspects that Gaunt is behind the population's increasingly violent behavior.
-
-
Please! No Distracting Keyboard Music
- By Andrea on 04-23-16
By: Stephen King
What listeners say about The Secret House of Death
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- writer reviewer
- 05-18-19
Great book!
Have always loved this story, though it is a bit old fashioned now in the 21st century. The reading by Simon Beale is excellent.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful