Rhoda Comfrey's death seemed unremarkable; the real mystery was her life.In A Sleeping Life, master mystery writer Ruth Rendell unveils an elaborate web of lies and deception painstakingly maintained by a troubled soul. A wallet found...

The search for the body commenced. Then the victim walked into town.Behind the picture-postcard façade of Kingsmarkham lies a community rife with violence, betrayal, and a taste for vengeance. When sixteen-year-old Lizzie Cromwell re...

The mysterious disappearance of two local teenagers and their baby-sitter draws Inspector Wexford into a baffling case involving dark family secrets, violence, a religious cult, adultery, and murder. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Vera, who lives with her invalid mother and idle husband, Stanley, struggles to find peace amid domestic strife, until Stanley, driven by hatred and ever-increasing conflict with his much disliked mother-in-law, decides to lend death ...

The 20th mystery in Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford series focuses on the relationship between parent and child, and the odd iterations of modern family life. When an 18-year-old mother is brutally murdered and her pregnant fri...

When Margaret Parsons disappears, Inspector Burden tries to reassure her frantic husband that she will be back by morning. Privately, though, he is certain Margaret has run off with another man. But then the missing woman's body is fo...

Nobody does North London squalor better than Ruth Rendell. Describing in vivid detail the cultural sewer in which a monster named Teddy Brex grows up, she uses hideous furniture, slovenly housekeeping habits, even his mother's diet wh...

"A spectacularly creepy and macabre tale" (Entertainment Weekly) of blackmail, murders both accidental and opportunistic, and of one life's fateful unraveling—from Ruth Rendell, "one of the most remarkable novelists o...

Is it dangerous to know too much about your neighbors? In Tigerlily's Orchids, Diamond Dagger Award–winning Ruth Rendell has written psychologically thrilling novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a London terrace—about the se...

Chief Inspector Wexford returns in a gripping new mystery from the author who Time magazine has called "the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world."After a truffle-hunting dog unearths a human hand instead of a pr...

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 Ins...

Mild-mannerd Arthur Johnson's empty and solitary existence is suddenly threatened when a worldly young man, a scholar working on a thesis on psychopathic personalities, arrives at the Trinity Road Lodging House at which he lives and s...

Three London women all lose the men in their lives under curious circumstances. The men in question all have similar characteristics--dark hair, a penchant for cleaning out bank accounts, and names with the initials J. L. And when one...

In this psychological thriller by the acclaimed master of the subgenre, Ruth Rendell, two mentally unbalanced people--one of them psychotic--coexist uneasily in a decaying London mansion. Michael "Mix' Cellini, a working-class ma...

When a housekeeper carries out a modern 'Valentine's Day Massacre' on the family that employs her, Detective Chief Superintendent William Vetch investigates to uncover evidence of a personal tragedy that precipitated the crime. Reprin...

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 c...

Ruth Rendell "is in top form" (Booklist) in this sequel to A Sight for Sore Eyes—one of Rendell's most beloved novels—featuring the retired Inspector Wexford.In the stunning climax to Rendell's classic A Sight for Sore E...

It was better than a hotel, this anonymous room on a secluded side street of a small country town. No register to sign, no questions asked, and for five bucks a man could have three hours of undisturbed, illicit lovemaking.Then one ev...

INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL'S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERSFrom crime legend Ruth Rendell, a psychologically intriguing novel about an old murder that sends shockwaves across a group of astonishingly carnal and appetiteful elderly frie...

This captivating novel about residents and servants on one block of a posh London street is a "sex comedy and a social satire, of the 'Upstairs Downstairs' variety, with a few murders mixed in for our added delight" (The Was...

A spine-tingling anthology by the New York Times–bestselling author and master of "psychological insight . . . and, not infrequently, teeth-chattering terror" (The New York Times).  These never-before-collected stories ...

Ruth Rendell is widely considered to be crime fiction's reigning queen, with a remarkable career spanning more than forty years. Now, in Portobello, she delivers a captivating and intricate tale that weaves together the troubled lives...

Sir Manuel Camargue, yesterday one of the most celebrated musicians of his time, today floats face down in the lake near his sprawling English country house. The consensus is accidental death -- but Inspector Wexford knows the stench ...

When Ismay and Heather's stepfather was discovered dead in the bathtub nine years ago, the police concluded the drowning was an accident. But Ismay has always silently suspected that Heather might have had something to do with it. Now...

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. IIt's now up to Mi...

Gossip in tiny Linchester is raised to new heights when young Patrick Selby dies on the night of his beautiful wife's birthday party. The whole neighborhood was there, witness to the horrible attack of wasps Peter suffered at the end ...

What kind of a person would kidnap two children?That is the question that haunts Wexford when a five-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl disappear from the village of Kingsmarkham. When a child's body turns up at an abandoned coun...

The bed was neatly made, and the woman on top neatly strangled.According to all accounts, Angela Hathall was deeply in love with her husband and far too paranoid to invite an unknown person into their home. So who managed to gain entr...

From "one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation" (People) a "refined, probing, and intelligent" (USA TODAY) mystery in the masterful Inspector Wexford series…more enthralling than ever after fifty ye...

From Ruth Rendell, "reigning queen of crime fiction" (Time Out), the 22nd installment in the acclaimed Inspector Wexford series.