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Thrillers to get your heart racing

If fast-paced fiction and captivating drama is your thing, look no further than 成人快手 Radio 4’s podcast, Limelight. It hosts a plethora of spine-tingling serials to get your teeth into – guaranteed to liven up even the dreariest of commutes.

Can’t choose from the vast array of fabulous looking fiction? From an unsettling paranormal page-turner to a panic-fuelled political satire, to a murder mystery wrapped up in the world of competitive gaming, here are five of our favourite thrillers.

Take your pick and buckle up…

1. Don鈥檛 Listen to This

The burnt-out esports athlete – Warstorm – starts live streaming. There’s something important he wants to share with his fans: he believes he has found “the holy grail.” But, just a minute later, he is dead. He made one phone call moments after the stream – to notorious esports psychologist Cressida Yang.

The mysterious death of her most successful former client thrusts Cressida back into the world of esports. A world she thought she had left behind. She searches frantically for answers in a quest to solve Warstorm’s mysterious death. Why did he call her only minutes before he died?

Cressida’s journey takes us through the public and private corners of the esports world, towards the shocking truth. A fabled unpublished game that may contain a deadly feature…

Do listen to Don’t Listen to This – a gripping, five-part psychological thriller by Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Del Col – for a nail-biting dive into the complex world of competitive gaming.

2. 11 Minutes Dead

What is the meaning of death? Where does it begin and where does it end? Can we travel backwards and forwards between the world of the living and the dead?

When Beth loses consciousness in a surfing accident – her heart stopping for 11 whole minutes – she is faced with a horrifying vision of the future: an old lady in a garden, calling her daughter, Sammi, to follow her… When Beth wakes up, she discovers that not only has she returned from the dead with mysterious new abilities, but that something sinister has followed her back from the other side.

Beth tries to convince everyone around her that she’s doing fine. But at home, and at the museum where she works, she begins seeing a figure out of the corner of her eye. Is her daughter Sammi in danger?

Beth goes in search of a scientist who might be able to shed light on what’s happening to her. An expert whose own daughter had a near-death experience, and also talked about a gate and a garden and an old woman calling her…

11 Minutes Dead is a haunting, powerful, paranormal thriller about near-death experiences and what might lie on the other side.

Listen to the trailer for 11 Minutes Dead

3. The Skies are Watching

Heather Haskins went missing two years ago on a camping trip with friends. That fateful morning her tent was found open, her sleeping bag empty. Heather, vanished. Then, on Halloween, she is discovered aboard a flight – on the other side of America – without a ticket or identification. She’s claiming she's a woman named Coral Goran – and that it's 1938.

Coral Goran’s son Vance – who says his mother disappeared from their front yard in a bright beam of light 85 years previously – wants to know why Heather was shouting his mother’s name. And Heather’s family is also searching for answers as they struggle to come to terms with what’s happened, and a new, unrecognisable version of Heather. How on earth did she get on the flight without a boarding pass? Why did she believe she was Coral Goran? Did Vance have a hand in Heather’s disappearance?

Or is the truth far stranger than anyone can fathom?

The Skies Are Watching – the 2024 recipient of the Audio Fiction Award at the Tribeca Festival – is a chilling thriller, dishing out extra-terrestrial shivers.

Listen to the trailer for The Skies Are Watching

4. Money Gone

How thin are the barriers between civilisation and chaos, when no one can access their money? Who will help others, and who will loot and steal? And what on earth is the Prime Minister – who was hoping for an easier ride – going to do?

On Valentine’s Day 2025, the UK awakes to financial catastrophe. Contactless isn’t working at train stations, shops or petrol stations. Cashpoints are down. Roads are soon gridlocked. It looks like Grace, who is seven months pregnant, has picked the worst possible day to run away from home.

As the country descends into anarchy, it becomes apparent that the problem is even bigger than people feared: the money isn’t stuck in the banks; the money has gone. And the whole world is affected.

The fate of the country’s economy now lies in the hands of the UK’s Prime Minister, but she’s not quite up to the job. Can she figure out the true cause of the crisis?

Money Gone is a fast-paced satirical drama by Ed Sellek, with sterling (pun-intended) performances from Robert Bathurst (Cold Feet), Charlotte Richie (Ghosts), Aaron Heffernan (War of the Worlds) and Josette Simon (Wonder Woman). Expect cliffhangers, dry humour, and toilet paper hoarders.

Listen to the trailer for Money Gone

5. Love and Other Lies

It started as a bit of innocent online flirting, because Josie was bored. Bored of doing the cooking, the cleaning, being condescended to by a teenage daughter and overlooked by a husband who thought more about their cockapoo than her. (She still loves Larry, but more in the way you love a cousin, or a really good cheese.) Josie has had enough.

But the suburban housewife’s dream of romance soon becomes the nightmare of sextortion. She’s gone from being titillated to terrified. With her catfisher threatening to post a certain video online if she doesn’t hand over thousands of pounds, Josie turns to the one person she thinks can help: her daughter’s hot-headed boyfriend, Tyler. She needs cash, and quick. Drug dealing is good for that, surely?

Soon, Josie’s embroiled in a web of deceit wider than she could ever imagine. Believing they’ve accidentally killed her catfisher, Josie and Tyler are blackmailed into working as money mules for his gang. And soon the police want to talk to Josie too. Do they know she's a mule or even worse, a murderer?

A rollercoaster of a comic thriller, written by Sarah Cartwright, Love and Other Lies will make anyone think twice about sending that sext.

Listen to the trailer for Love and Other Lies

There you have it, five of the top Limelight thrillers.

Make sure to head over to 成人快手 Sounds where you can subscribe to Limelight so that you never miss a new series!