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  • The Murderer's Son

  • A Jackman and Evans Thriller
  • By: Joy Ellis
  • Narrated by: Richard Armitage
  • Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (2,570 ratings)

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The Murderer's Son cover art

The Murderer's Son

By: Joy Ellis
Narrated by: Richard Armitage
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Publisher's Summary

Twenty years ago: a farmer and his wife are cut to pieces by a ruthless serial killer.

Now: a woman is viciously stabbed to death in the upmarket kitchen of her beautiful house on the edge of the marshes.

Then a man called Daniel Kinder walks into Saltern police station and confesses to the murder.

But DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans of the Fenland Constabulary soon discover that there is a lot more to Daniel than meets the eye. He has no memory of the first five years of his life and has a rather unusual obsession with his mother....

Full of twists and turns, this is a crime thriller that will keep you gripped until the shocking ending.

©2016 Joy Ellis (P)2016 Audible, Ltd

What listeners say about The Murderer's Son

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  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A fatastic series

This series is fantastic if you enjoy a series as you can get to know the characters as well as enjoy the story lines. \I hope there are more with these characters to cme

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Richard Armitage great... story not so!

Story a bit predictable - not the best I have listened to, as with other reviews I only continued listening because of Richard Armitage.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Poor storyline, a very disappointing read.

Struggled to finish. Only saving grace was Richard Armitage, otherwise I would have stopped listening in the beginning.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Twists and turns

I honestly could not stop listening to this book, I love this author and characters, although fictional it reflects so many truths in a persons life that you can feel the moment during the plots

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Fantastic

Great story again would highly recommend anyone to read well worth the time great storytelling

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Maybe the worst book I've ever 'read'

If this is what commercial fiction is--what it most typically and essentially is, maybe the literary snobs have a point

Listening to this book made me reflect on where I've come from, and where (or what) I've come to, as a reader. Some prehistory: In the beginning, that is, in my childhood and teenage years, I read only various kinds of commercial fiction, mostly fantasy, and nurtured a deep disdain for literary fiction (which I'd never read) on the basis that (so I'd been told) people who liked literary fiction disdained the kind of books I liked. I was in fact, a perfect inverted snob. I hated what I had never bothered to attempt to understand. That changed. I started to read literary fiction, and found, somewhat to my amazement, that venerally I enjoyed it. My taste evolved and developed. I grew up, and my taste grew with me. But I found, even as it expanded in some directions, it retracted in others. Now that I had become sensitised to the rythms of prose, now, basically, that I could tell good writing from bad, many kinds of writing that I had previously, thoughtlessly enjoyed I could no longer enjoy. Vast domains of low-brow literature I had previously romped through with blithe indifference to the aesthetic quality of my surroundings were now cut off. For instance, while I could, and can still, reread endlessly The Lord of the Rings or The Charioteer or The Nun's Story, when I tried to reread The Way of Kings, which I had adored the first time it was handed to me by my high school librarian, I found I couldn't. I just couldn't get through it. Something blocked me. I wondered what was wrong with me. I know now there was nothing wrong with me. I had simply arrived at the point where I could no longer enjoy bad writing, and Brandon Sanderson is a bad writer--at least a bad writer stylistically. His plots and world and characters are as compelling to me as ever. Joy Ellis is also a bad writer, on a prose level. Unfortunately her plot and setting and characters do nothing, on this volume at least, to redeem her.

In the first place, the badness of the writing was only amplified by way the narrator reads it (or "performs", as the cover pretentiously puts it). The lines on their own are unrealistic enough but coming out of the voice of the characters they're just daft. One describes someone as 'a real community-spirited woman'. It's something an American politician delivering a half-hearted eulogy for someone he hardly knew might say, perhaps. A grizzled Yorkshire policeman? Hardly. Rally it's a line that belongs in a writer's character notes, not a published novel. It's like the whole thing, in fact, is written in outline. Both the narrator and the characters speak in the most boring, most hackneyed turns of phrase. Everything is stated so matter-of-factly, in the most direct and bloodless language imaginable. It's all so artless and graceless. There's so much telling rather than showing.

The time this is supposed to be set in was quite unclear. "This is the 21st century" a character says, blandly, but are we sure? So many other things the characters say date the story at least several decades back
A white (blond, in fact) male journalist is described as a 'new up-and-coming voice' or something like that and the police record a suspect's interrogation on a literal tape (surely they don't still use those).
Needless to say, this was written by an old person.

And I really just can't get over the prose. It's so astoundingly banal and cliché. I know people don't read crime novels for the prose but surely even Agatha Christie isn't this bad? Maybe it's just because it's read aloud I notice it more. But this is so much worse, so much more soulless, than ordinary bad writing. This is a novel written in bureaucratic managerial English, the English of press statements and official announcements, of popjourno explainers and back-of-packet disclaimers, not of any kind of literature; no, not even the low-brow kind.

I've never encountered anything quite like it. Listening to it read aloud was almost physically painful. Cliches piled upon cliches; piled into a mountain of cliches that collapses on you and you're drowning in them. It's as if the writer was deliberately plumbing for the most boring and characterless way to say every single fucking thing. I can't even pick out specific examples because it's all like that. This has been a revelation in all the worst ways.

As for the plot and characters, I couldn't keep track of either. This is generally the case with audiobooks. Unfortunately I didn't care about either, either. The revelation of the killer and his motive was contrived and unconvincing. The only reason I listened to this book at all was for a glimpse of the young (hopefully cute) psycho serial killer boi promised by the title. And in the end I didn't even get that.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Addictive for a second time

Like the first book in the series, couldn't stop listening to it! Richard Armitage makes for very engaging and easy listening.

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent read

Enjoyed so much I have gone on to read entire series, cannot recommend highly enough

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Gripping. Love Joy Ellis stories

Wonderful story and narrated beautifully by Richard Armitage.
Didn't pick the ending, spell binding to the finish.

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

I am obsessed

Loved it! Couldn't stop listening! The story had a few existing twists and the narrator has a soothing voice (not too soothing) and read the story incredibly well

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