Preorder pages are allowed to be incomplete. This one stopped being a preorder some time ago: the release date on the record reads July 16, 2026, which has been and gone, and the audiobook still shows no runtime, no reader and no ratings of any kind. What it does show is a seventh Duncan McAdam novel, a desecrated grave in a cemetery, and a trawler crew who are almost all dead.
Blank Fields Where the Narrator Should Be
Three blanks on a single page is a lot. Duration reads Not Yet Known. The narrator field is empty. No rating and no written response has appeared at all. For a book already past its stated publication date, and the seventh of an established series at that, the combination is genuinely odd, and it leaves a buyer unable to answer the two questions that decide most audio purchases: how long is it, and whose voice am I living with?
Imprints disagree with one another as well. The publisher field says Transworld Digital, which is where ebooks live, while the description opens on Brought to you by Penguin and the copyright line at the foot credits Penguin Audio with the 2026 recording. Three names for what is presumably one corporate family, and the one occupying the publisher slot is the one that does not make audio. Somebody built this record from the digital edition.
The sales claim comes from the same place. Number one digital bestselling is a chart position for ebooks, deployed here to sell a recording, which is a slightly different product bought by slightly different people. Unputdownable, in the clause immediately following, is a verb for a physical object. None of it is dishonest. All of it confirms that this marketing copy was written for a page rather than a file, and nobody adapted a word.
Dead Crewmen, One Survivor, No Place Name
The hook is good and it is specific. A grave has been desecrated. The man buried in it skippered a trawler with a history nobody wants examined, and every member of his crew is dead: one fell, one took his own life, one went off a clifftop. A single crewman is still alive. That is a closed set, a countdown and a motive inside three sentences, and it holds up well across a long listen because you always know how many pieces remain on the board.
Procedural structure suits listening better than most crime does. A detective moving from a cemetery to a widow's kitchen to a harbor, putting the same questions to different people, gives a listener a clean run of scenes with distinct locations and distinct voices, and the mystery advances through conversation rather than through anything you need to see printed. Whoever is eventually credited will have a book made largely of dialogue to work with.
McAdam gets a private life alongside the case, which is what keeps a series like this running past book three. The copy has his personal difficulties with his son resurfacing as the investigation spirals, and readers who have followed six previous volumes will care about that as much as about the trawler. Anyone arriving new gets the case, and the domestic material lands as texture rather than as payoff.
Setting is the other draw, and the record is coy about it. The series is called The Misty Isle, the copy supplies a cemetery, a clifftop, a stormy night at sea and a ransacked house, and no place name appears anywhere. Island crime fiction works particularly well in this format, where weather and water do half the atmospheric work through sound alone, and a book whose deaths all involve height or sea has the right raw material for it.
British Spellings and a Hidden Book Seven
Plenty arrives free with the description. It names the desecrated grave, the trawler's past, the manner of three separate deaths, the ransacked house, the blood on the floor and the body in the trunk of the widow's car. Most of the first act, in other words, sits on the page before you have spent anything. That is the standard trade for a series thriller, where a blurb has to prove the book deserves your week, but if you prefer walking in cold, walk in after the first two lines.
Copy also functions as its own content warning, intentionally or otherwise. One man takes his own life, two die in falls, a grave is opened and a body turns up in a car. Anyone who wants to know what a crime novel holds before committing has been told here, which is more consideration than most listings extend, even when the motive behind it is marketing rather than care.
Two practical notes for a listener buying from the United States. The copy is written in British English with British imprints behind it, so expect spellings and idiom to match. And nothing in the displayed title or the description says this is the seventh book; only the series field carries a number. A listener who prefers to start at volume one has to go hunting for a list this page does not provide.
Wait for the Narrator Field to Fill In
No newcomer should start here, at least not by choice. Six books of relationship between McAdam and the people around him are already banked, and the copy leans on exactly that when it makes the trouble with his son part of the pressure. Returning readers of the series are the intended audience, and for them the closed set of dead crewmen is a strong premise with a clean shape.
Wait for the fields to fill in if you are buying on the reading. Committing now means an unknown number of hours in an unknown voice, and series listeners care a great deal about that continuity, which is precisely what this page cannot confirm. Check back once the credits appear, or begin with the first Misty Isle book while you wait.
Questions Listeners Ask
When does the audiobook arrive, and who narrates it?
The record shows a release date of July 16, 2026, which has already passed, and the narrator field remains empty. No runtime is listed either, since the duration reads Not Yet Known. If the reader matters to you, wait until the credits appear on the page before ordering.
Is a runtime listed for the audiobook yet?
Not yet. The duration field reads Not Yet Known, months after the stated publication date, so nothing on the record indicates whether this runs eight hours or fourteen. Penguin Audio holds the 2026 recording copyright, while the publisher slot on the page names Transworld Digital instead.
Does the publisher description give the plot away?
A good deal of the opening. The grave, the separate deaths of the crew, the ransacked house and what turns up in the widow's car are all laid out before you spend anything. Stop after the line about secrets that cannot be buried if you would rather meet the case as the detective does.
