Ruth Rendell

"Mystery novel about friendship, love, and aging. Synopsis: In the wanting months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood. Throughout the summer of 1944--until one father forbids it--the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal...

Former Chief Inspector Wexford returns from retirement to solve a most unlikely case: the mystery of who killed the three people whose corpses were last seen at the bottom of a coal hole in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999). In the decade since Franklin Merton left St. John's Wood in 1998, Orcadia Cottage has changed hands twice by the time Martin Rokeby, who wants to make room for an amphora his wife Anne found in Florence, pulls up a manhole cover in...

"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...

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

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Chief inspector Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years earlier, Targo stalked and taunted Wexford, daring him to press charges after a woman was found strangled in her bedroom. Over the years there are more unsolved, apparently motiveless murders in the town, and Wexford suspects that the...

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...

Wexford is horrified by the carnage he encounters at Tancred Manor, home of a famous anthropologist, but he is determined to do all that he can for 17-year-old Daisy, the only survivor of the mass murders that obliterated her family.

Acknowledged as one of today's premier mystery writers, Ruth Rendell has won three Edgar Awards and four Gold Dagger Awards. She received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded the Commander of the British Empire. Among her most popular books are those in the Inspector Wexford series. Harm Done presents the inspector with a most volatile challenge: the various guises of domestic abuse. The residents of a shabby...

A young recluse, believing in the occult power of magic, will do anything to keep her family together as they grow apart   When Dolly's mother-her only friend-dies, twenty-three-year-old Dolly becomes a second mom to her younger brother, Pup. Socially isolated and booze-addled, Dolly believes that Pup's occult power, and a talisman he's made for her, will give her the life she wants. But as Pup grows older and her father takes a new wife, her carefully...

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...