Ruth Rendell Main

Wexford series

As Barbara Vine

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UK Police Procedural,

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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 a cockamamie story about him being a central heating salesman. Still, it's a shock when she's found shot dead, covered by the equally dead body of the "salesman." Now Susan Townsend - the Norths' next-door neighbor, who discovers the bodies - must help Louise's husband, Bob, get back on his feet. But is she helping a neighbor . . . or a murderer?

There are only two things that interest Stanley: the crosswords and getting his hands on his mother's money, which he has dreamed about for 20 years. He finally realises that he must construct a puzzle of his own in order to give death a helping hand.

Two years ago he was a promising young novelist. Now he barely survives, in a near-derelict cottage with only an unhooked telephone and his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla, but the affair is over and the long slide into deception and violence has just begun.

A collection of Ruth Rendell mysteries. A wife plots her husband's psychological destruction - then his murder; a son is ruined by his mother's obsession; a man marries the woman he rescues from suicide, only to become the victim of her obsessiveness; and a family feud brings unimaginable horror.

For 20 years, he had never known how to communicate with women, except with her. But something terrible happened one day, and she was no longer there.

A Judgement in Stone

Four members of the Coverdale family died in the space of 15 minutes on St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on that Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television, and was arrested two weeks later. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there.

Alan Groombridge is married to a woman he doesn't like, is a bank manager of a tiny branch, and is doomed to a life of boredom and tedious routine. All that saves him is a fantasy of stealing enough of the bank's money for just one year of freedom.

Martin Urban wins the pools and decides to help those less fortunate. Finn also comes into money and wants to help people - but only if the price is right. The good intentions of the one become fatally entangled with the macabre madness of the other.

Stephen Whalby loves to walk the moor. He considers it his, although he and his young wife Lyn are merely tenants in a flat nearby. But the senseless and frightening murder of a young woman invades Stephen's sense of privacy and pollutes his beloved moor with suspicion and dread. And then a second murder captures his imagination in an unpredictable and fascinating way . . .

Mopsa, driven by a past scarred by madness and violence. Benet, stricken by the most grievous loss any woman can bear. Carol, trapped in a life of crushing drabness no lover can change. Three mothers joined by a single thread of terror, whirled into a spiral of kidnapping, murder, and a final, reckless affirmation of love.

In a shabby London suburb, sixteen-year-old Pup Yearman dabbles in magic. But for Pup's older sister Dolly, the magic is more than dabbling. Deformed by a facial birthmark, Dolly desperately wants to be cured, and her obsession with Pup's magic sends her on a dangerous downward spiral into confusion, madness, and possibly murder. And meanwhile, in a squalid boardinghouse not far away, a young Irishman sharpens a set of butcher knives . . .

Murder, corruption, blackmail. All these are part of someone else's world, not part of the everyday lives of ordinary people...or are they? This is a collection of sinister stories from the bestselling author who won The Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990.

After ten years in prison for shooting - and permanently crippling - a young policeman, Victor Jenner is released to a strange new world and told to make a new life for himself. It's hard to fill the days, but at least there's one blessing - he was never convicted for all those rapes he committed. Then Victor meets David, the policeman he shot all those years ago, and David's beautiful girlfriend, Clare. And suddenly Victor's new life is starting to look an awful lot like the old one . . .

Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but the agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play. But John Creevey doesn't know 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…

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, doesn't die. But then he meets Senta Pelham, a beautiful, sensual, childlike actress who flagrantly disdains the morals of society and passionately desires the elusive Philip. But what is the real reason for her obsessive devotion? Most important, will their flesh-and-blood relationship require a murder to prove it is the real thing?

Going Wrong

Ever since they ran with the same London teenage gang Guy Curran has loved Leonora Chisholm passionately. He was a slum kid, and her parents lived in tasteful Kensington; she went to university while he made his jet-set fortune dealing drugs and sentimental, mass-produced art - but he's always been good enough for her, and once they were lovers. Of course she'll marry him in the end - he's been calling her every day for years and buying her lunch every Saturday. Then Leonora tells him she's engaged to some pasty-faced intellectual. But Guy knows she's being brainwashed by her family and friends - from her snobbish brother and her mother with pointy silver fingernails to her so-superior feminist roommate. Leonora and he belong together...If he can't have her, he'll die - or someone else will.

Here are nine new stories - one starring the astute Inspector Wexford - that turn a microscope on the tortuous pathways of the human mind and the merciless twists of fate. Poetic justice overtakes a cocksure young thief from the public library... a dying man's wife exacts a subtle revenge when he begs to see his long-lost mistress...A perpetual failure discovers his solitary talent-homicide...The accidental death of the queenly cat Melusina locks her killer into the strange life of an old lady and her feline hierarchy...A girl's acquiescence in murder boomerangs again and again.

A mother and a daughter live quietly in the rustic gatehouse of Shrove House, an isolated British estate. Their life seems perfectly ordinary except that daughter Liza has been kept isolated from the outside world for all of her sixteen years. And that he has seen her beautiful mother commit murder... more than once. Now, as the police come searching for a missing man, Liza's sheltered, strange world begins to fall apart. Piece by piece she will reveal her mother's tale of betrayal, desire, and obsession. Step-by-step we discover how much like mother, like daughter she is.

London's wealthiest, poorest, kindest, and most vicious citizens all cross paths in Regents Park. Quiet, pretty Mary Jago could never have suspected that a series of unspeakable murders in the park contained threads that tangled around her simple, ordinary life.

A Sight for Sore Eyes tells three stories, and for the longest time, the reader has no inkling of how they will come together. The first is a story of a little girl who has been scolded and sent to her room when her mother is brutally murdered; as Francine grows up, she is haunted by the experience, and it is years before she even speaks. Secondly, we become privy to the life of a young man, Teddy, born of unthinking young parents, who grows up almost completely ignored. Free of societal mores, he becomes a sociopath, who eventually discovers that killing can be an effective way to get what he wants. Thirdly, we meet Harriet, who from an early age has learned to use her beauty to make her way in the world. Bored by marriage to a wealthy, much older man, she scans the local newspapers for handymen to perform odd jobs around the house, including services in the bedroom. When these three plots strands finally converge, the result is harrowing and unforgettable.

In this collecton, Ruth Rendell deals with a variety of themes, some macabre, some vengeful, some mysterious, and all precisely observed.

A mystery surrounds three women, and three men who have recently disappeared completely from their lives. There are other women too, unknown to one another, who have had relationships with a dark-haired man who is no longer around.

Collected Short Stories

Four collections of Ruth Rendell stories, originally published separately - The Fallen Curtain and other stories (1976), Means of Evil and other stories (1979), The Fever Tree and other stories (1982) and The New Girlfriend and other stories (1985).

The Ruth Rendell Omnibus

An omnibus edition of three Ruth Rendell crime novels - A Demon in My View, A Judgement in Stone and The Face of Trespass.

The Second Ruth Rendell Omnibus

An omnibus edition of three Ruth Rendell murder mysteries - To Fear a Painted Devil, Vanity Dies Hard and The Secret House of Death.

The Third Ruth Rendell Omnibus

This third Ruth Rendell omnibus includes One Across, Two Down, Make Death Love Me and The Lake of Darkness.