Showing results by author "Ruth Rendell" in All Categories

There were some things about Chief Inspector Wexford's trip to China that he could never have dreamt of: That an old woman would haunt him from one city to the next. That a man would be tragically drowned. Or that, back in England, he would be investigating the murder of one of his fellow tourists.

Louise North doesn't care what the neighbors think. She lets her lover leave his car just outside her house in broad daylight, telling everyone he is a central heating salesman. Still, it's a shock when she's found shot dead, covered by the equally dead body of the "salesman." It was his third visit to the gloomy house on Orchard Drive. Each time, he parked in the same place. Each time, he carried a briefcase. And each time, Louise North greeted him at the door.

Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but these agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play. Not that John Creevey knows this. To him, the messages he decodes with painstaking care are the communications of dangerous and evil men, and as he comes face to face with the fact of his beloved wife Jennifer's defection, he begins to see a way to get back at the man she left him for.

The body found under the hedge was that of a middle-aged woman, biggish and gaunt. The grey eyes were wide and staring, and in them Detective Chief Inspector Wexford thought he saw a sardonic gleam, a glare, even in death, of scorn. But that must have been his imagination, and imagination was almost all he had to go on. The woman was a stranger. Her handbag held little more than three keys on a ring and forty-two pounds in a new wallet.

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles - died in the space of fifteen minutes on the 14th February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later she was arrested for the crime. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there...

By the writer of the Wexford novels and read by George Baker. Someone must have had good reason to murder Mrs Elizabeth Nightingale on a dark September night. And as Detective Chief Inspector Wexford investigates, he discovers sinister undercurrents and dramatic secrets beneath the placid surface of the Nightingales' lives….

With deceptive economy in these nine short stories, Ruth Rendell indicates hidden depths in ordinary events and creates a sense of profound unease. The stories are: 'A Pair of Yellow Lilies', 'Paperwork', 'Mother’s Hel'p, 'Long Live the Queen', 'Dying Happy', 'The Copper Peacock', 'Weeds', 'The Fish-Sitter', and 'An Unwanted Woman'.

In Rendell's evocative portrayal of West London, the slums of Notting Hill Gate and the mews houses of Holland Park may, geographically, only be streets apart but, socially, they are worlds apart. When these two worlds collide, the repercussions are fatal. Guy, from a council flat in Notting Hill Gate and Lenora, a wealthy middle-class young girl were childhood sweethearts, and despite Lenora’s mother’s disapproval, belonged to the same criminal gang.

When he unexpectedly comes into a small fortune, he decides to use his newfound wealth to help out those in need. Finn also leads a quiet life, and comes into a little money of his own. Normally, their paths would never have crossed. But Martin’s ideas about who should benefit from his charitable impulses yield some unexpected results, and soon the good intentions of the one become fatally entangled with the mercenary nature of the other.

Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and their daughter, Sheila’s, coach house in Hampstead. Wexford takes great pleasure in his books, but, for all the benefits of a more relaxed lifestyle, he misses being the law. But a chance meeting with an old acquaintance in a London street changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case.

When a local Romeo goes missing and two more young men are attacked, Chief Inspector Wexford begins to suspect murder.Rodney Williams was neither handsome nor wealthy, but he had an unerring eye for a pretty girl and when he disappeared and two other men were later attacked by a young woman, Chief Inspector Wexford couldn’t help wondering if there was a connection. If there wasn’t, where was Rodney Williams and why had he vanished?

Eve and Liza, Mother and Daughter, live a quiet life in their remote home; a rustic gatehouse of a country mansion. At first glance their lives appear quite ordinary, except that Liza has almost no knowledge of the outside world, has never played with a child her own age and has witnessed her mother commit murder, on multiple occasions.

In the waning months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. Throughout the summer of 1944 - until one father forbids it - the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female.

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. Then a second woman went missing on the moor, and a sense of utter dread gripped the fifty local men who searched for her. Someone watched them in that treacherous place. Was he a killer? Or was he merely angry that a killer had usurped him? For he, and only he, was the Master of the Moor.

Chief Inspector Wexford tries to solve a murder with no evidence, not even a body. Anita Margolis had vanished. There was no body, no crime - nothing more than an anonymous letter and the intriguing name of Smith. According to HQ, it wasn't to be a murder enquiry at all. In fact, Inspector Burden has no trouble seeing a pattern in the Margolis case. Anita was wealthy, flighty, and thoroughly immoral.

Sarah Hussain was not popular in the community of Kingsmarkham. She was born of mixed parents - a white Irishwoman and an immigrant Indian Hindu. She was also the Reverend of St Peter's church. But it came as a profound shock to everyone when she was found strangled in the vicarage. A garrulous cleaner, Maxine, also shared by the Wexfords, discovers the body. In his retirement, the former Detective Chief Inspector is devoting much time to reading, and has little patience with Maxine's prattle.

In the waning months of the Second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighbourhood outside London. Throughout the summer of 1944 – until one father forbids it – the subterranean space becomes their 'secret garden', where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female.

There are only two things in life that interest Stanley: solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law’s money. For 20 years, the puzzles have been his only pleasure, the money his only dream. It has never occurred to Stanley that his mother-in-law would try to outsmart him and the money would never be his. Until now. It is only now that Stanley, so clever at misleading double meanings and devious clues, decides to construct a puzzle of his own - and so give death a helping hand.

A collection of nine beautifully crafted, terrifying and intriguing tales of spine-tingling psychological terror and suspense from Ruth Rendell. The title story, is about a man whose life, in a sense, is a book. Life for Ambrose Ribbon is lonely, paranoid and obsessive without his mother, yet there is one book that he associates particularly with her: Volume VIII of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Piranha to Scurfy'. It marked a very significant moment in their relationship.

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. In prison, inevitably, he reflected on the grotesque way it had begun, about the panics and violent anger. He asked himself, too, why the child of happily married, middle-class parents should have needed to make motiveless and unreasoning attacks on women. Holed up in that house with the girl, he had not meant to pull the trigger. It was panic.