This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Ravensdene Court is a twenty-five-chapter mystery by the British crime writer J. S. Fletcher, published in 1912 and set on the Northumberland coast between Alnwick and the sea. Leonard Middlebrook, a young Lincoln's Inn barrister, is invited by letter to a lonely house on the cliffs and arrives to find his host's household already under a shadow: a man has been found dead on the shore below the house, and a wandering seafarer named Salter Quick has been murdered on the headlands with a pocket-book torn from him. Around the case gather the local police inspector, the dry old Devonport detective Scarterfield, the Scottish-French savant Mr. Cazalette — who pursues a tobacco-box and a blood-stained handkerchief bearing a coronet and the letters "V de C" — and Dr. Lorrimore of Ravensdene Court itself, whose Chinese servant Wing slips in and out of the story with a silent competence nobody quite accounts for.
The trail leads from a Blyth bank robbery to a Hull ship-broker, a North Sea yawl bought with Bank of England notes, and two ancient chests of consecrated plate looted from Forestburne Abbey and Mellerton Priory at the Reformation. Behind it stands Netherfield Baxter, the bankrupt son of a Blyth family, who has come back from the China coast wearing another man's name and a beard grown over a scar — accompanied by a French nobleman and a Chinese cook, and followed by a tale of the Yellow Sea, of a marooned island, and of a ruby torn from the eye of a temple idol. Fischer's people talk their way through the whole business — in hotels, in ships' cabins, on a derelict shore — until the yawl burns, the conspirators die, and a dying servant hands the jewels back to the man who trusted him. It closes with clear decks, a courtship begun in a galley, and Middlebrook's candid confession that he had been frightened out of his wits the entire time.
