Ruth Rendell

A handsome young craftsman falls in love with a sweet, upper-class girl in Britain. The girl's stepmother opposes the romance because of his low-class origin so he murders her. Not his first murder, either. By the author of Road Rage.

Over the years there have been several unsolved, apparently motiveless murders in the town of Kingsmarkham, and Wexford (as a young policeman) quietly suspected that the increasingly prosperous Targo -- van driver, property developer, kennel owner, and animal lover -- was behind them. Now, half a lifetime later, Inspector Wexford spots Targo back in Kingsmarkham after a long absence.

Inspector Wexford and his assistant Burden unravel the threads connecting the drowning of an elderly, world-renowned flautist and the murder of a woman whose identity confounds them.

Who would garrote a middle-aged housewife and leave her body in the parking garage of a suburban shopping mall? Chief Inspector Wexford is no sooner on the case than a car bomb's explosion lands him in the hospital. It's now up to Mike Burden to step in and solve the case. He's got a suspect . . . but will he be able to make him talk?

A young woman, sheltered from the outside world, comes to terms with her deluded, murderous mother-and what she must do to survive   When the police come to the door at the gatehouse of a remote British estate, sixteen-year-old Liza and her mother know that their lives are about to change forever. After all, Liza watched her mother kill a man-well, more than just one. Having lived as a virtual hermit on the estate, Liza knows nothing of the outside...

In the Edgar Award–winning classic, a niece investigates the shocking secrets that condemned her once proud family Faith Severn has never understood why the willful matriarch of her high-society family, aunt Vera Hillyard, snapped and murdered her own beloved sister. But long after Vera is condemned to hang, a journalist's startling discoveries allow Faith to perceive her family's story in a new light.   Set in post–World War II Britain, A Dark-Adapted...

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,...

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 shadowy cloister of vague and uncertain terror.

Charlie Hatton wanted fast money and conspicuous success, and he was prepared to cut any corners to get them. But before he could realize a single ambition, he was found dead at the edge of a river.

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.