Listening to Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Hachette, 13 CDs, £24.47; Buy this book) is a long haul but hypnotically fascinating. The pace is well suited to the mindset of its narrator, Faraday (who is given perhaps more charm than the author intended by Peter Vance’s velvet-voiced narration), and to the gradual shifting of the Hundreds Hall into irreversible decay. Faraday, who has risen a class to become a doctor, becomes increasingly obsessed by its cash-strapped occupants, the Ayres family. But as one grotesque incident after another punctuates the lives of the charmingly upper-crust Mrs Ayres, her war-wounded son, Roddie, and her coarsely hearty daughter, Caroline, we begin to suspect that there is something malevolent and otherwordly in play at Hundreds Hall.

Nothing could be less otherworldly than the rational conclusions of G. K. Chesterton’s famous Father Brown detective stories, although their small but saintly moon-faced hero and his villainous antagonists often seem to have supernatural talents. The Innocence of Father Brown (Naxos, 4 CDs, £16.99; Buy this book) offers six ingenious cases. The narrator, David Timson, enters into these exquisite cameos of Edwardian London with his customary energy, and makes the most of Chesterton’s musical and sympathetic prose and lively dialogue interchanges. More, please.

Listen to audio samples: The Little Stranger / The Innocence of Father Brown

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