It’s just a regular day for Sherlock Holmes and his admiring sidekick Dr Watson – no sooner has a cipher of seemingly random numbers been rapidly revealed by the razor-sharp Baker Street sleuth to contain a dire warning, than a policeman turns up to whisk the two men off to a moated castle where someone has been murdered in baffling circumstances. Holmes sees the hand of his deadly enemy Professor Moriarty behind the deed, but the roots of the tale turn out to be in the violent gang culture of the Pennsylvania coalfields. This backstory extends Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (Naxos £19.99, 6 hrs 25 mins, unabridged, or download £11.91 at naxosaudiobooks. com) beyond the usual length for a Holmes adventure, although David Timson, who reads the story, has to work hard to keep us entertained until the great detective comes back on the scene.

The Valley of Fear was first published – in serial form – during the first world war, although there are no references to the conflict in the story. No matter, the current crop of audio books is particularly strong on military history. Paul McGann reads Sharpe’s Fury (HarperCollins £15.99, 6 hrs 30 mins, abridged), the latest audio adventure of Richard Sharpe, Bernard Cornwell’s soldier hero. It’s 1811, the war against the French is raging in the Iberian peninsula, and Sharpe and his band of men are battling the wily Colonel Vandal for the Spanish port of Cadiz. There’s a modicum of robust soldierly language, all part of the evocation of army life in the Napoleonic wars. As well as devising clever strategies against the enemy crapauds, Sharpe has to keep his own unruly troops in order and outwit an antiBritish plot. Based on actual events, but with a hero whose flourishes would not have been viewed kindly in the real army, it’s a lively entrée to military history.

More straightforward is Hastings (Campaign Trails £9.95, 1 hr 12 mins), a tightly written account of the encounter at Senlac Ridge in 1066, when 8,000 Saxons faced a similar number of invading Normans. Peter Poyntz Wright’s script, narrated by the military historian David Urquhart in a nononsense fashion, sets the scene and proceeds with an abundance of fascinating detail.

From such well-researched facts, you can go further back in time, to More Tales from the Greek Legends (Naxos £10.99, 2 hrs 36 mins, download £6.54), retold by Edward Ferrie and read by Benjamin Soames. This turns out to be a sort of Mount Olympus Babylon, where the bold and the beautiful perform fabulous deeds (Bellerophon slays the Chimera, Orpheus braves the underworld in search of his beloved Eurydice) but also discover the terrible consequences of hubris and vanity.

Even further into the realms of fantasy, 14-year-old Mia Thermopolis shares her intimate thoughts on becoming princess of Genovia. Three of the popular Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot have been preloaded onto a neat little MP3 player as one of Macmillan’s new Wordplay range, giving nine hours of girlie giggles (£24.99).

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