Ruth Rendell

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

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge kills the wrong person. The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while....

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....

Chief Inspector Wexford is concerned about a pedophile who has been recently released back into the community but cannot foresee a series of serious crimes waiting to happen....

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

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

A bypass is planned in Kingsmarkham, but before the protestors make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman is discovered....

Alan Groombridge had a fantasy....

Two damaged children. Teddy became a handsome young man, Francine was beautiful - a sight for sore eyes. But it was death that brought them together....

A spectacularly compelling story of blackmail, murders both accidental and opportunistic, and one life’s fateful unraveling....

A simple case of a man running off with a woman other than his wife. But when another woman reports that her husband is missing, the case turns unpleasantly complex....

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?....

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....

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles....

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

Louise North doesn't care what the neighbors think. She lets her lover leave his car just outside her house in broad daylight....

'I think you know who killed your stepfather', said Wexford....

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia....

Sarah Hussain was not popular in the community of Kingsmarkham. She was born of mixed parents - a white Irishwoman and an immigrant Indian Hindu....

The bleak expanse of Vangmoor was a dark, forbidding place. One victim had been found there, blonde, her face disfigured, her head shorn close to the scalp - killed without motive or mercy....