Patricia Cornwell’s series of crime thrillers featuring the forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta have now overtaken Catherine Cookson’s romances in the most borrowed books from public libraries. How well do they work as audio? In the latest, Predator (Time Warner, CDs £15.99/tapes £14.99, offer £14.39/ £13.49), Scarpeta’s researches into compulsively predatory men counterpoint her investigations into the fate of a murdered girl and her efforts to locate a missing family. It is read by Mary Stuart Masterson, who made her acting debut at the age of 7 in The Stepford Wives. She shows a sure touch as the baffled sleuths of the Massachusetts crime squad and as Scarpeta herself.

She copes superbly with the hi-tech information that is Cornwell’s hallmark, swanning into lines such as “someone may be monitoring your calls from a multi-line phone that’s connected to the PBX system” or “I wish we had the use of a scanning electron microscope with an energy-dispersing system so we could establish the histology of the polymorpho-nuclear white cells”. I understood only one word in three at times, but I was fascinated, especially with an arch weirdo called HOG, who turns out to be the Hand of a female God — a sick young woman closer to the heart of Scarpeta’s investigation than she should be. It’s curious how cosy listening to horror can be.

A different experience is offered by a collection of unabridged Herman Melville tales, Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Stories (Naxos, CDs, £10.99, offer £9.89). Read with vigour and unholy glee by William Roberts, they are a series of sparklingly constructed parables of a profiteering new world in which gain threatens humanity. The most serious is Bartleby, a disturbing tale that still nestles in the back of my mind to be puzzled over, set among mid-19th-century office clerks, mindlessly copying out gains and losses.

In passive resistance to it all, Bartleby chooses to exist all but invisibly. At first highly efficient, if contrary, with his reiterated “I prefer not to”, he steadily shifts to absolute inaction, to the mystification, anger and finally compassion of his employer.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy