The Moonstone

On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder inherits the Moonstone, an enormous yellow diamond looted from a Hindu shrine, trailing a legend that three guardians will follow it to the ends of the earth. By morning it is gone from her cabinet, and the mystery begins to consume everyone in the house: the celebrated Sergeant Cuff, with his melancholy passion for roses, sees the truth early and is sent away for it; a servant girl behaves inexplicably and walks into a quicksand's shadow; and Rachel herself refuses, furiously, to say what she saw.

T. S. Eliot called this the first and greatest of English detective novels, and its innovations (the country-house theft, the celebrated detective, the least-likely solution) became the genre's blueprint. Like The Woman in White, it is told by a relay of narrators, and the voices are half the joy, especially the house-steward Betteredge, who consults Robinson Crusoe the way others consult scripture, and the sublimely awful evangelist Miss Clack. The solution, involving one of the strangest experiments in fiction, remains genuinely surprising. A long, rich, funny book that audio was practically invented for.

At roughly 189,300 words, The Moonstone runs about 21 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “The Moonstone” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.