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 Moonstone is in the public domain, so the complete text is free on Project Gutenberg and LoudReader has the entire Project Gutenberg catalog built in. To listen:

1. Download LoudReader for Mac or iPhone (free, no account).
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.

LoudReader reads with natural offline voices, so the whole book works on a plane or underground. It is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device. Listening is unlimited on the free tier.