Ruth Rendell

A Sight for Sore Eyes tells three stories, and for the longest time, the reader has no inkling of how they will come together. The first is a story of a little girl who has been scolded and sent to her room when her mother is brutally murdered; as Francine grows up, she is haunted by the experience, and it is years before she even speaks. Secondly, we become privy to the life of a young man, Teddy, born of unthinking young parents, who grows...

Winner of multiple Edgar and Gold Dagger awards including the most prestigious Edgar of them all, the Grand Master, Ruth Rendell returns with a novel that pits Chief Inspector Wexford against a quite personal foe: the environmental terrorists who kidnap and threaten the lives of five hostages—including Wexford's own wife.
As Road Rage begins, Chief Inspector Wexford is walking through Framhurst Great Wood, just outside his beloved town of Kingsmarkham,...

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.

Stories included:

Loopy by Ruth Rendell,...

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...

A psychological thriller about an isolated young woman and her murderous mother from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Girl Next Door.

Far from London, the isolated estate called Shrove House looms over the English countryside. Inside, two women hide from the world. For sixteen years, Eve has protected her daughter, Liza, from the corrupting influence of modern life, never letting her outside,

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"A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. The gossipy cleaning woman who discovers her body, Maxine, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. When detective inspector Mike Burden calls him, Wexford, intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. A single-mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was a woman...

The psychologically charged affairs between residents and servants on a posh London street escalate to violence involving a handsome valet who is sleeping with a lord's wife and daughter, an au pair who aids her mistress's affair, and a disturbed gardener.