Ruth Rendell

The first girl had a bite mark on her neck, but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler'....

Chief Inspector Wexford finds nothing unusual in the disappearance of Rodney Williams, a husband and father who likely has run off with another woman. But when the man’s car and suitcase are discovered abandoned, can a body be far behind? Confounded by a string of violent stabbings, a strident...

With floods threatening his home, Chief Inspector Wexford already has his hands full when he learns that two local teenagers have gone missing ....

No one would have described Manningtree Grove as fashionable....

Sir Manuel Camargue, yesterday one of the most celebrated musicians of his time, today floats face down in the lake near his sprawling English country house. The consensus is accidental death -- but Inspector Wexford knows the stench of murder most foul when he smells it. Particularly in the...

Chief inspector Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk.

The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy....

All he has to go on is his own intuitive suspicions. Was he becoming cynical and untrusting or was this one of the most ingenious crimes he had ever tackled?....

In a gloomy cellar, the figure of a beautiful, pale woman makes no move when the man advances on her from the shadows....

With deceptive economy in these nine short stories, Ruth Rendell indicates hidden depths in ordinary events and creates a sense of profound unease....

Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage....

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet was what looked like a heap of rags....

There were some things about Chief Inspector Wexford's trip to China that he could never have dreamt of....

There are only two things in life that interest Stanley: solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law’s money....

Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be the prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? And Charlie's death was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women. Now Chief...

Senta Pelham is a mirror image of Flora, the lovely marble bust Philip fanaticized about for so long. But life, like art, is not always what its mere surface suggests. And Senta’s strange world of make-believe, where truth and falsehood are eerily interchangeable, soon draws Philip into a...

Victor Jenner has just been released from prison where he spent 10 years paying for the shooting and crippling of a young policeman. But his new freedom serves only to fuel his obsession with the events that precipitated his arrest...

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck....

The massacre at Tancred House seems at first to be the work of a burglar, panicked into killing. But Chief Inspector Wexford believes there are links with the murder of a Kingsmarkham detective....

Wexford is shopping for his wife’s birthday present when the body of a strangled woman is discovered nearby. Then his daughter is arrested for an anti-nuclear war demonstration, and a car bomb puts him in the hospital while a psychopathic killer is loose and bent on revenge...