Ruth Rendell

"When his father dies, Carl Martin inherits a house in an increasingly rich and trendy London neighborhood. Carl needs cash, however, so he rents the upstairs room and kitchen to the first person he interviews, Dermot McKinnon. That was colossal mistake number one. Mistake number two was keeping his father's bizarre collection of homeopathic "cures" that he found in the medicine cabinet, including a stash of controversial diet pills. Mistake number...

"A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. The gossipy cleaning woman who discovers her body, Maxine, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. When detective inspector Mike Burden calls him, Wexford, intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. A single-mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was a woman...

A clerk who believes he has decoded the messages of an actual spy ring, instead of a schoolboys complex game, plans to use the network to find the man who has stolen away his wife.

When a young man moves into a recently inherited Suffolk manor house, he falls into a summer idyll that gathers friends and strangers alike-and concludes in murder When the new owners of Wyvis Hall go to bury a dear pet dog, they stumble upon a ghastly relic left by the home's previous occupants: the bones of a woman and a small child, hastily interred. So opens a mystery set in motion a decade before when nineteen-year-old Adam Verne-Smith inherited...

A street hustler-turned-wealthy businessman races to extricate his childhood sweetheart from the arms of her fiancé before it's too late When Guy Curran, a streetwise hustler from the wrong side of the tracks, falls in love with good-girl Leonora, he knows that one day she will be his wife. But as life leads the two down different paths, Guy's obsessive love takes a murderous turn. Convinced that Leonora's respectable family has conspired against...

A beautiful woman fascinated by death insists that Philip, whose one eccentricity is a neurotic fear of death and violence, must commit murder to prove his love for her.

An elderly nursing home patient tells stories of her past that seem to mirror her caregiver's life to a disturbing degree-and that's before the stories take a deadly turn Stuck in a loveless marriage and mired in a troubled affair, Genevieve Warner doesn't have a friend in the world-until she meets Stella, a patient at the nursing home where she works as a caregiver. Whip smart and deeply familiar, Stella confides in Genevieve the story of her life,...

In the Gold Dagger Award–winning crime novel, a young man writing a history of London's Underground must contend with a killer living under his own roof All his young life, Jarvis Stringer has obsessed over the London Underground. Now he's writing a detailed history of the subway, and to make money in the meantime he rents out cheap rooms in the crumbling former schoolhouse he's inherited, all to desperate single mothers, buskers, subway vigilantes,...

When Lizzie and Bell meet for tea after nearly two decades apart, the topic of conversation is murder-one that Bell herself committed When Elizabeth Vetch spots Bell for the first time in seventeen years, she chases her down in order to learn why her old friend committed a terrible murder all those years ago. Bell has been in prison ever since the mysterious events that took place at the House of Stairs, a London mansion full of over-privileged, overstuffed,...

The Veiled One: "Why on earth?" wonders London's chief inspector Reginald Wexford when a sixtyish housewife is found garroted in a shopping mall garage, her body concealed under a velvet shroud. Before he can find the answer, he's nearly killed himself-by a politically motivated car bombing targeting his activist daughter. With the inspector in the hospital, the case falls to his partner, Mike Burden. But when a strange mother and son are suspected,...