The Singing Sands

Written by Josephine Tey

Narrated by Karen Cass

The sixth and final book in the Inspector Alan Grant series.

One of Tey’s finest novels, The Singing Sands centres on the mysterious death of a young man on a train, and the cryptic poem that gradually reveals the greed and envy behind his demise.

"He stumbled up the steps and across the bridge ... great bursts of steam billowed up round him from below, noises clanged and echoed from the dark vault about him. They were all wrong about hell, he thought. Hell wasn’t a nice cosy place where you fried ... Hell was concentrated essence of a winter morning after a sleepless night of self-distaste."

Diagnosed with ‘overwork’ and in the grip of debilitating claustrophobia, Inspector Alan Grant takes leave from Scotland Yard and heads for the peaceful home of his cousin Laura, who lives with her family in the Scottish Highlands. As the London mail draws into Inverness, he sees the surly sleeping-car attendant trying to rouse an unresponsive young man. He is compelled, firstly, to point out that the passenger is dead, and secondly to pick up the newspaper that has slipped onto the compartment floor. On it the deceased, who appears to have drunk himself into oblivion, has scrawled an elusive poem about a paradise guarded by ‘singing sand’. Grant is soon fascinated by the hopes and dreams of the dead man with ‘tumbled black hair and ... reckless eyebrows’. And though he has planned to do nothing in Scotland but fish, he cannot help but act on the growing suspicion that a far more sinister story is waiting to be uncovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SNR Audio
• Release date: Apr 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915268907

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey, author of The Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair, was born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Inverness in Scotland in 1896. She trained and worked as a teacher before returning to her family home to look after her elderly parents. It was there that she took up writing. Although she described her crime writing, written under the pen name Josephine Tey, as ‘my weekly knitting’ she was and is recognized as a major writer of the Golden Age of Crime writing. She was also successful as a novelist and playwright, writing under the name of Gordon Daviot. Her plays were performed in London and on Broadway. A fiercely private woman, she died at her sister’s home in 1952.