Showing results by author "Ruth Rendell" in All Categories

From three-time Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Ruth Rendell comes a captivating tale of residents and servants on one block of a posh London street - and the deadly ways their lives intertwine. Life in the well-manicured London locale of Hexam Place is not as placid and orderly as it appears. Behind the tranquil gardens and polished entryways, relationships between servants and their employers are set to combust. Henry, the handsome valet to Lord Studley, is sleeping with both the Lord's wife and his university-age daughter.

The best-selling author of Harm Done and A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell has written dozens of gripping works under her own name and as Barbara Vine. She has received three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and four Dagger Awards from England’s Crime Writers Association. How frightening can a book be? Ambrose Ribbon, self-appointed editor and grammar police, is about to find out.

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police and her family and neighbors had already begun to search for her body. She had been missing for three days. Never an articulate child, between her confusion and amnesia she could not plausibly describe where she'd been or why she'd been away. Soon after, a convicted pedophile is released back into the community, adding to the already heightened fears of parents in the Muriel Campden Estate where he lives. Then the child of a wealthy executive disappears, and not long after, a suspect in the kidnapping is found stabbed to death.

Although Ismay finds herself feeling intensely protective of her little sister and of the secret they share, their lives move placidly, even happily, forward. It seems as if the mysterious death of their stepfather is behind them. But when Heather becomes seriously involved with a man for the first time, Ismay's long-repressed memories can no longer be ignored. With painful inevitability, the surprising truth will emerge, whether Ismay wants it to or not.

Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and their daughter, Sheila’s, coach house in Hampstead. Wexford takes great pleasure in his books, but, for all the benefits of a more relaxed lifestyle, he misses being the law. But a chance meeting with an old acquaintance in a London street changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case.

The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Nine years on, she and her sister, Heather, still live in the same house in Clapham. But it has been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lives upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy drowned, has disappeared. Ismay works in public relations, and Heather in catering. They get on well. They always have. They never discuss the changes to the house, still less what happened that August day.

More of the Greatest Mysteries of All Time is the second in a series featuring the finest short story mystery fiction by the most acclaimed writers, past and present. From Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, Jack London, Vincent Starrett and everyone in between, this unique collection, edited by multi-award winning mystery connoisseur Otto Penzler, is a delightful mixture of mystery and suspense.

When Elizabeth Vetch spots Bell for the first time in 17 years, she chases her down in order to learn why her old friend committed a terrible murder all those years ago. Bell has been in prison ever since the mysterious events that took place at the House of Stairs, a London mansion full of over-privileged, overstuffed, and somewhat sinister boarders, landed her there. Now it’s up to Lizzie to put together the pieces of her friend’s - and her own - fateful past.

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, and doesn’t die.

Discover a world of heroes and villains, suspense and intrigue. This riveting and comprehensive collection brings together some of the best crime writing of all time. Ruth Rendell and Frances Hegarty spearhead the modern genre, moving through the popular and rarely recorded Graham Greene, to Edgar Wallace and G.K. Chesterton and his master detective Father Brown. And that's not all.

Most people would have screamed. Mrs Hathall made no sound. She had seen death many times before, but she had never before seen a death by violence. Heavily, she plodded across the room and descended the stairs to where her son waited. "There’s been an accident", she said. "Your wife’s dead." Chief Inspector Wexford could discover no motive, no reason and no suspect – all he had were his intuitive suspicions. Probably he was reading meaning where there was none; probably Angela Hathall really had picked up a stranger, and that stranger had killed her.

Sent to London for a rest by his doctor, Wexford can’t resist getting involved in the investigation of a mysterious murder. Read by TV’s Chief Inspector Wexford.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person. The driver behind is spared. But only for a while....

Senta Pelham is a mirror image of Flora, the lovely marble bust Philip fanaticized about for so long. But life, like art, is not always what its mere surface suggests. And Senta’s strange world of make-believe, where truth and falsehood are eerily interchangeable, soon draws Philip into a shadowy cloister of vague and uncertain terror.

The bleak expanse of Vangmoor was a dark, forbidding place. One victim had been found there, blonde, her face disfigured, her head shorn close to the scalp - killed without motive or mercy. Then a second woman went missing on the moor, and a sense of utter dread gripped the fifty local men who searched for her. Someone watched them in that treacherous place. Was he a killer? Or was he merely angry that a killer had usurped him? For he, and only he, was the Master of the Moor.

When he unexpectedly comes into a small fortune, he decides to use his newfound wealth to help out those in need. Finn also leads a quiet life, and comes into a little money of his own. Normally, their paths would never have crossed. But Martin’s ideas about who should benefit from his charitable impulses yield some unexpected results, and soon the good intentions of the one become fatally entangled with the mercenary nature of the other.

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles - died in the space of fifteen minutes on the 14th February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later she was arrested for the crime. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there...

Love and death are the principal players in these two BBC Radio full-cast dramatisations of chilling Ruth Rendell stories. In "The Bridesmaid", when Philip embarks on an affair with Senta, his sister's bridesmaid, she reminds him of the stone statue he adored as a child. Yet Senta is married, and Philip's overwhelming aversion to violence leads indirectly to murder and horror as he is drawn into erotic but murderous complicity.

Sarah Hussain was not popular in the community of Kingsmarkham. She was born of mixed parents - a white Irishwoman and an immigrant Indian Hindu. She was also the Reverend of St Peter's church. But it came as a profound shock to everyone when she was found strangled in the vicarage. A garrulous cleaner, Maxine, also shared by the Wexfords, discovers the body. In his retirement, the former Detective Chief Inspector is devoting much time to reading, and has little patience with Maxine's prattle.

A bypass is planned in Kingsmarkham, but before the protestors make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman is discovered. Burden thinks he knows the identity of the murderer, but Wexford is not convinced.