Showing results by author "Ruth Rendell" in All Categories

The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Nine years on, she and her sister, Heather, still live in the same house in Clapham. But it has been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lives upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy drowned, has disappeared. Ismay works in public relations, and Heather in catering. They get on well. They always have. They never discuss the changes to the house, still less what happened that August day.

Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.

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.

Sent to London for a rest by his doctor, Wexford can’t resist getting involved in the investigation of a mysterious murder. Read by TV’s Chief Inspector Wexford.

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. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.

When Stuart Font decides to throw a house-warming party in his new flat, he invites all the people in his building. After some deliberation, he even includes the unpleasant caretaker and his wife. There are a few other genuine friends on the list, but he definitely does not want to include his girlfriend, as that might involve asking her husband. The party will be one everyone remembers. But not for the right reasons.

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.

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 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.

Revenge is one of the great themes in literature, from Shakespeare to Poe. This collection contains 18 original stories commissioned for this volume plus a reprint of a classic Ruth Rendell mystery.

Most people would have screamed. Mrs Hathall made no sound. She had seen death many times before, but she had never before seen a death by violence. Heavily, she plodded across the room and descended the stairs to where her son waited. "There’s been an accident", she said. "Your wife’s dead." Chief Inspector Wexford could discover no motive, no reason and no suspect – all he had were his intuitive suspicions. Probably he was reading meaning where there was none; probably Angela Hathall really had picked up a stranger, and that stranger had killed her.

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an 'S' rather than a 'C') is superstitious about the number 13. In the musty old house where he is the lodger, there are thirteen steps down to the landing below his rooms, which he keeps spick and span. His elderly landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer, was born in St Blaise House, and lives her life almost exclusively through her library of books, so cannot see the decay and neglect around her.

Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not so sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny is afraid their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better - after all, Luke has her to take her mother's place. But then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancee, and Elvira decides that she will stop at nothing to stop her father's marriage.

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?

From the writer of the Wexford novels and read by Isla Blair. Once, when Benet was about fourteen, they had been in a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. Threatened her with it, rather. Benet had been wondering why her mother had brought such a large handbag with her, a red one that didn’t go with the clothes she was wearing. Mopsa had shouted and laughed and said wild things and then she had put the knife back in her bag.

Philip Wardman had more than just the ordinary squeamishness where death was concerned. Yet he could hardly avoid the suspicious disappearance of his sister's friend Rebecca Neave, especially when everyone was ascribing the cause to murder. Philip's feminine ideal is the statue of the Roman goddess Flora in his mother's garden. His marble Flora doesn't fade, doesn't alter, and doesn’t die.

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'.

Jock was supposed to have died in the Paddington train crash. Minty had received a letter from the railway company. But, curiously, the police hadn't been in touch. And Jock had gone off with all her savings. Then Jock's ghost starts reappearing to Minty: at home, at work, even in the cinema. He even touches her. Minty started to carry a knife. If he wasn't made of shadows, would he bleed?

Dex works as a gardener for Dr Jefferson at his home on Hexam Place in Pimlico: an exclusive street inhabited by the rich, and serviced by the not so rich. The hired help, a motley assortment of au pairs, drivers and cleaners, decide to form the St Zita Society (Zita was the patron saint of domestic servants) as an excuse to meet at the pub and air their grievances. When Dex is invited to one of these meetings, the others find that he is a strange man, ill at ease with human beings....

When Stuart Font decides to throw a house-warming party in his new flat, he invites all the people in his building. After some deliberation, he even includes the unpleasant caretaker and his wife. There are a few other genuine friends on the list, but he definitely does not want to include his girlfriend, as that might involve asking her husband. The party will be one everyone remembers. But not for the right reasons.