Ruth Rendell

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck....

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.

The first girl had a bite mark on her neck, but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler'....

The massacre at Tancred House seems at first to be the work of a burglar, panicked into killing. But Chief Inspector Wexford believes there are links with the murder of a Kingsmarkham detective....

The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy....

When his father dies, Carl Martin, a philosophy graduate and struggling novelist, inherits a house in a trendy London neighborhood....

Having published 45 books, Ruth Rendell is an internationally popular mystery writer.....

Louise North doesn't care what the neighbors think. She lets her lover leave his car just outside her house in broad daylight....

Wexford is shopping for his wife’s birthday present when the body of a strangled woman is discovered nearby....

All he has to go on is his own intuitive suspicions. Was he becoming cynical and untrusting or was this one of the most ingenious crimes he had ever tackled?....

One particular member of the local press is gunning for the Chief Inspector, distinctly unimpressed with what he regards as old-fashioned police methods....

Wexford can’t be bothered when a woman complains of a runaway husband. But his disappearance takes on a new urgency when a second woman reports her husband is missing too.....

A proposed highway through a forest near Kingsmarkham has caused loud cries of protest. One group has taken more drastic measures....

Liza is raised in a remote rural hamlet. One evening, Liza’s mother orders her to leave home forever. Paralyzed at having to fend for herself, Liza finds refuge with Sean, a drifter with whom she begins to share the bizarre story of her life....

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.....

There were some things about Chief Inspector Wexford's trip to China that he could never have dreamt of....

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....

Charlie Hatton wanted fast money and conspicuous success, and he was prepared to cut any corners to get them....

Ruth Rendell is widely considered to be crime fiction’s reigning queen. In Portobello, she delivers a captivating and intricate tale that weaves together the troubled lives of several people in the gentrified neighborhood of London’s Notting Hill....

In Rendell's evocative portrayal of West London, the slums of Notting Hill Gate and the mews houses of Holland Park may, geographically, only be streets apart but....