This is the third installment of the adventures of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, a small posse of residents of a retirement village in Kent. Everyone hated them, but they worked - and we may thank Ferrone for sparing us any attempt to reproduce them. But the real engine of his success was the in-your-face TV ads performed by the manic comedian Jerry Carroll. Add to that forgery, swindling his ex-wife out of monetary support and operating under a false identity. Antar’s financial finagling was relentless: He pocketed sales tax, scammed insurance companies, shifted money to give the illusion of growth and profited handsomely through insider trading. His delivery is so engaged with Eddie’s flimflam and high jinx, it is almost impossible to believe that he - or at least his voice - was not a player. Narrator Richard Ferrone, whose gravelly, big-city voice is wonderfully suited to stories of criminal enterprise, does the book full justice. Weiss’s irresistible account of the life of Eddie Antar, a small-time huckster and high school dropout who became a wealthy merchant, securities fraudster, fugitive and convict, is also a tale of the rise of consumer electronics in America and a fond portrait of the sleazy, disintegrating city that was New York in the 1970s. Aside from a tedious, unnecessary litany of characters at the beginning, this production is perfect. He truly inhabits the characters, his voice and manner finely tuned to the personality and convictions of each: Goffe, a fanatical, millenarian Puritan Whalley, more practical and ultimately disillusioned Nayler, smoothly menacing, but prey to depression.

Veteran actor Tim McInnerny delivers a masterly narration of Harris’s novel. Ned Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, both historical figures, are pursued from England to America, across the “archipelago of tiny settlements” of New England, by a fictional nemesis, Richard Nayler, a man obsessed with avenging the deaths of his wife and infant son. If seized, the men were to be hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors. The edict pardoned anti-royalists with exceptions, most notably of the 59 men who had signed Charles I’s death warrant (a painful thought during the reign of another Charles). This enthralling novel takes its title from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and Charles II’s proclamation designed to bring peace after the upheaval of the English Civil War and Interregnum.

Lesley manville the bullet that missed