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Kings and Queens of Crime - Essays on major Crime Writers - Val McDermid on Ruth Rendell 

Elizabeth Nightingale found peace and tranquility on her nightly walks through the rich, dense forests surrounding Myfleet Manor. But the peace she treasured was shattered one night when she found death waiting in the woods. Chief Inspector Wexford and his colleague Inspector Burden find a most unsavory case on their hands - and must use all their wit and wisdom to solve it . . .

Seven-and-a-half months after the first disappearance, five-year-old John Lawrence failed to come home. It was only then that the letters began. Evil, mad, taunting letters - letters that made the worst, unspoken imaginings a brutual reality ...

In a gloomy London cemetery a girl is found murdered - a girl with a name that isn't hers, a girl with no friends, no possessions, and no past. It shouldn't have been a case for Detective Chief Inspector Wexford - but it proves to be one of the most macabre and challenging investigations of his career.

In spite of dire predictions, the rock festival in Kingsmarkham seemed to be going off without a hitch, until the hideously disfigured body is discovered in a nearby quarry. And soon Wexford is investigating the links between a local girl gone bad and a charismatic singer who inspires an unwholesome devotion in his followers.

Shake Hands Forever

The Chief Inspector can discover no motive, no reason and no suspect for Mrs Hathall's daughter-in-law's murder - all he has are his own intuitive suspicions. Probably Angela Hathall really had picked up a stranger, and that stranger had killed her. But why the doubt?

The body found under the hedge was that of a middle-aged woman. The gray eyes were wide and staring, and in them Inspector Wexford thought he saw a sardonic gleam. But that must have been his imagination. The woman was a stranger. There was nothing to give him her address, name or occupation, let alone any clues that might lead to her killer.

A collection of five Wexford cases, ranging from the more ordinary crimes of passion and violence in quiet Kingsmarkham to a bizarre murder in Yugoslavia.

An old man dies when he loses his foothold in the snow on a dark night, slipping into the water and then under the ice. It appears to be an open-and-shut case.

Chief Inspector Wexford is in China, visiting ancient tombs and palaces with a group of British tourists. After their return to England, one of his fellow tourists is found murdered. As he questions other Members of the group, Wexford finds secrets of greed, treachery, theft, and adultery, leading the distressed inspector to ask not who is innocent, but who is least guilty . . .

Rodney Williams's disappearance seems typical to Chief Inspector Wexford - a simple case of a man running off with a woman other than his wife. But when another woman reports that her husband is missing, the case turns unpleasantly complex.

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?

For a Kingsmarkham CID sergeant, May 13 was the day he died - carrying a fake gun confiscated from his schoolboy son...and the mysterious trigger of five more murders. A year later Chief Inspector Wexford is called to Tancred House, where grand dame Davina Flory and her family lie shot to death in a tableau of blood. The only survivor, seventeen-year-old Daisy Flory, insists her life is finished anyway. A strange girl...who stirs feelings in Wexford that are too close to home. But right now he must focus all his formidable powers of thought on a case with no witnesses, two suspects vanished into thin air, clues that range from grooves inside a gun barrel to a blackmailer left dangling from a tree - and a kaleidoscope of motives from greed and revenge to sex and mania.

In the quiet Sussex country town of Kingsmarkham, the daughter of Nigerian physician Raymond Akande is missing. "It's probably nothing, " says Dr. Akande to his friend and client Chief Inspector Wexford, whose help he enlists. But the days that follow prove the doctor dreadfully wrong. A young woman is found murdered not Melanie but the last person to have seen and spoken to her. A second woman's body is discovered, again not Melanie's, but like her, young and black. A third woman turns up beaten and unconscious; like the others, she is of Nigerian origin. As Inspector Wexford's investigation stretches from days into weeks, it becomes his unhappy obligation to counter the hopes of the doctor and his wife. In Wexford's professional opinion, Melanie, like the other young women, has become the victim of a serial killer with a horrifyingly singular objective.

A by-pass is planned in Kingsmarkham that will destroy its peace and natural habitat forever. Dora Wexford joins the protest, but the Chief Inspector must be more circumspect: trouble is expected. As the protesters begin to make their presence felt, a young woman’s badly decomposed body is unearthed. Burden believes he knows the murderer’s identity but Wexford is not convinced. Furthermore, having just become a grandfather, he is struggling to put aside his familial responsibilities and emotions in order to do his job. The case progresses, the protest escalates. And alarmingly, a number of people begin to disappear, including Dora Wexford.

Harm Done

Lizzie reappears after three days and people have already begun to search for her body. Then, another young woman disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the community. Residents of Muriel Campden estate are suddenly prepared to take the law into their own hands.

The Babes in the Wood

'I've just heard a crazy thing, thought it might amuse you. You look as though you need cheering up.' Burden seated himself on the corner of the desk, a favourite perch. Wexford thought he was thinner than ever. 'Woman phoned to say she and her husband went to Paris for the weekend, leaving their children with a - well, teen-sitter, I suppose, got back last night to find the lot gone and naturally she assumes they've all drowned.' 'That's amusing?' 'It's pretty bizarre, isn't it? The teenagers are fifteen and thirteen, the sitter's in her thirties, they can all swim and the house is miles above the floods.' There hadn't been anything like this kind of rain in living memory. The River Brede had burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley had escaped flooding. Even where Wexford lived, higher up in Kingsmarkham, the waters had nearly reached the mulberry tree in his once immaculate garden. The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles and Sophie Dade, let alone the woman who was keeping them company, Joanna Troy. But Mrs Dade was still convinced her children were dead. This was an investigation which would call into question many of Wexford's assumptions about the way people behaved, including his own family...

An omnibus edition of three of Ruth Rendell's Wexford mysteries. They feature a predictable, ordinary woman who meets a passionate death, a reinvestigation of a hanging 15 years earlier, and the puzzling death of a cocky little lorry-driver.

An omnibus edition of three of Ruth Rendell's Wexford mysteries. They feature the discovery of sinister undercurrents when an apparently respectable woman is murdered, evil letters that make unspoken imaginings a brutal reality, and the killing of a girl in a gloomy London cemetery.

This omnibus includes three Inspector Wexford novels, Some Lie and Some Die, Shake Hands Forever and A Sleeping Life.

An omnibus edition of three Inspector Wexford mysteries - Wolf to the Slaughter, Put on by Cunning and The Speaker of Mandarin.

An omnibus edition containing three of Rendell's bestselling Wexford mysteries.