William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Whole Story Audio, 2 CDs, £24.46; Buy this book) is a pacey thriller that lends itself peculiarly well to narration, as Boyd puts us into four contrasting mindsets.

A climatologist, Adam Kindred, interrupts a hitman murdering a research scientist who is about to blow the whistle on a wonder drug. With both the police and the hitman after him, he goes to ground with remarkable ingenuity, evoking memories of both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Rogue Male. Ingram Fryzer is the CEO of the pharmaceutical company developing the drug, who gradually discovers how little control he has over his business partners. Rita Nashe is a feisty East End copper in the marine branch of the force. Finally, and most intriguingly, we hear the story as experienced by Johnjo Case, the brutal former SAS hitman.

The setting is as important as the characters: the luxurious enclaves and the sink estates of modern London, and through it all the Thames, into which unwanted people are tumbled with cruel abandon, but which also provides opportunities to escape. The narrator, Martyn Ellis, transfixes the listener with a bravura performance, voicing Rotherhithe deadbeats, Southwark evangelists, upper-class Chelsea twits and ruthless South Americans with equal conviction.

A rather different kind of weather preoccupies The Storm by Vince Cable (Whole Story Audio, 6 CDs, £17.61; Buy this book), an extremely useful short guide to the financial crisis and what we can expect next. As well as giving the usual dizzying account of mislaid trillions, Cable, a former chief economist at Shell, pulls in the race for oil and the effects of the current industrial boom in Asia. I did try the book, but found the story much easier to assimilate, narrated with measured emphasis by Terry Wilton.

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