Trent's Last Case: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Trent's Last Case, credited to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Trent's Last Case, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Read by Kirsten Wever. This is one of a series of EC Bentley novels featuring the highly erudite artist qua reporter / detective, Philip Trent. In it, Trent is sent to a charming English seaside village to cover the murder of Sigsbee Manderson for a large London newspaper. The victim is an unpopular and extremely powerful financial tycoon, who is murdered virtually within sight of his own house, at a time when it seems impossible that anyone there – to say nothing of all of its more than half dozen inhabitants – could have failed to see or hear the crime being committed. As Trent pokes around, attention is focused on Manderson’s extremely troubled marriage, not least because Trent himself falls in love with Margaret Manderson, the widow of the murdered man. At the same time, Trent himself considers her to be at least complicit in the crime for much of the novel. The plot cannot be described further without spoiling the punch-line, as it were. Indeed, to the really clever detective fiction-lover, this is already almost saying too much. Trent’s Last Case was on the “ten best” list of Rex Stout, author of the famous Nero Wolfe mysteries. Like Stout, Bentley has a fondness for complex plot twists of the “boxes within boxes” variety. (Introduction by Kirsten Wever)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Trent's Last Case
• Author credits: Edmund Clerihew Bentley
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 17
• Listed recording duration: 7:43:23

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• mystery
• murder
• The Woman in Black
• detective

Track guide

1. 00 - Prologue — 18:17
2. 01 - Chapter 1 - Knocking the Town Endways — 15:58
3. 02 - Chapter 2 - Breakfast — 34:15
4. 03 - Chapter 3 - Handcuffs in the Air — 1:01:36
5. 04 - Chapter 4 - Poking About — 29:05
6. 05 - Chapter 5 - Mr. Bunner on the Case — 18:20
7. 06 - Chapter 6 - The Lady in Black — 24:55
8. 07 - Chapter 7 - The Inquest — 12:07
9. 08 - Chapter 8 - A Hot Scent — 13:09
10. 09 - Chapter 9 - The Wife of Dives — 21:05
11. 10 - Chapter 10 - Hitherto Unpublished — 39:19
12. 11 - Chapter 11 - Evil Days — 19:59
13. 12 - Chapter 12 - Eruption — 42:53
14. 13 - Chapter 13 - Writing a Letter — 7:50
15. 14 - Chapter 14 Part 1 - Double Cunning — 42:36
16. 15 - Chapter 14 Part 2 - Double Cunning — 32:46
17. 16 - Chapter 15 - The Last Straw — 29:22

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.