Welcome to The Best of Binge Reading 2023, Part Two, the second and final of our shows featuring the most listened to episodes on our popular fiction podcast, chosen solely on the basis of the number of times you, our audience, listened to them. It goes without saying they’re all best sellers, authors at the top of their game.



There’s something for everyone here, nerve wrenching contemporary thrillers from Ireland, to a French love story from a well loved TV actress; a World War II spy mystery by an Australian - set in the House of Dior in Paris, and a riveting journey into the world of the famous Mitford sisters, once acclaimed as London society beauties and then reviled as rotten traitors.



We present brief excerpts from each show, with links for where to find them if you’d like to hear more... As in previous years, we’ve selected shows that aired between Dec 1, 2022 and Dec 1, 2023.



So here they are – excerpts from the top six shows of 2023 on The Joys of Binge Reading.



Twisty Thrillers - Catherine Ryan Howard







Irish thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard with her latest nerve shredding suspense Runtime.



Catherine Ryan Howard - Thriller author



It’s a book that was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book Of The Year, and is a Top 10 Kindle Best Seller.



She been dubbed the Queen of High Concept thrillers for her intricate plotting which require a special excel spreadsheet...



First up I asked her about her revelation that Runtime was inspired by her actor brother, John Ryan Howard.



Jenny Wheeler: You've said that the original idea was inspired by your brother. Can you tell us about that connection? 



Catherine Ryan Howard:  Yeah, he loves when I do interviews about this book because he gets a mention. So, he is an actor, and a few years ago he was in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. 



Of course, he was telling me all about the experience of being on set and one of the things he said, and in Beyond The Woods - if you read Runtime will sound very familiar because it was filmed in this house out in the middle of nowhere in the Cork countryside, in the dead of winter overnight.



They were shooting everything at night, and he said one of the first things they did is the director had to go to the local police station and say, look, if someone calls you at four in the morning to say, ‘I hear screens, I think someone's getting murdered.’ They're not.



It's just us filming.



And of course, being a crime writer, I immediately thought, what if it's someone getting murdered?



That's a great cover story. You're giving yourself a bit of a bit of time to get away a head start.



When I sat down to write the book, that idea went away and it turned into something else.



Movie making is murder



But that's the initial seed, and I loved the idea of there being a script for horror movie that when the actors go to film it, the same things that are happening in the script start to happen on the set, because of course your first question I think would be, is this really happening or is my director secretly filming me or something?



It’s hard to know what's real and what's not, and I think that's at the core of the novel.



Jenny Wheeler: Yes, exactly. You do open with a scene where the director and an assistant go and knock on someone's door and say, ‘if you hear any screaming, don't worry.’ And I immediately thought, oh,