And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie | Free Audiobook
Ten strangers, one island, and a nursery rhyme counting down
Ten people accept an invitation to an isolated mansion on an island off the Devon coast. None of them has ever met the host, a certain Mr U. N. Owen, and none of them can quite explain why they said yes.
At dinner a recorded voice starts going through the guest list, accusing each of them in turn of a guilty secret from their past. By the end of the night one of them is dead, a violent storm has cut the island off from the mainland, and the framed nursery rhyme hanging in every bedroom has started to look less like decoration and more like instructions.
From there the deaths continue, in the order the rhyme dictates, and the question stops being who the killer is and becomes whether anyone at all will be left to answer for it.
The premise has been copied so many times that it is easy to forget how clean it is here: a closed island, a finite cast, a countdown everybody can see and nobody can stop. There is no detective arriving at the end to explain things, which is what makes it still feel modern.
Christie wrote it in 1939, when her publishers were nervous about the title, and it has been in print ever since for the obvious reason: the structure is airtight. Each death removes a suspect and increases the pressure, and the nursery rhyme gives the whole thing a rhythm that makes six hours go by in one sitting.
Dan Stevens reads it with a restraint that works in its favour. He does not perform the horror, he just lets the guests get more frightened and more polite, which is exactly the register this book needs.
The reservations you will find in reviews are mostly about expectations rather than execution: there are readers who come to it after hearing it called the greatest mystery ever written and find it very much middle of the road. Others feel the characters, being types on purpose, do not get deep enough to care about. Bear both in mind and you will enjoy it for what it is, which is a masterclass in construction.
I loved it. If you want more Christie on the site, Hallowe’en Party is there too.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie puts ten strangers on an island off the Devon coast, summoned by a host nobody has met, and kills them one by one in the order of a nursery rhyme.
It runs 6 hrs and 1 min, read by Dan Stevens. You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like.
Once you claim it through the trial the book stays yours to keep even after you cancel, and you spend the trial on whichever title you like. At six hours it is a single long evening.
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