Showing results by author "Ruth Rendell" in All Categories

This case is proving a difficult one for Chief Inspector Wexford. 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?

Two young girls disappear then return home unharmed some days later. Chief Inspector Wexford is concerned about a pedophile who has been recently released back into the community but cannot foresee a series of serious crimes waiting to happen.

A spectacularly compelling story of blackmail, murders both accidental and opportunistic, and one life’s fateful unravelling from Ruth Rendell, writing at her most acute and mesmerising. When his father dies, Carl Martin inherits a house in an increasingly rich and trendy London neighbourhood. 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.

Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years earlier, when Wexford was a young police officer, a woman called Elsie Carroll had been found strangled in her bedroom. Although many still had their suspicions that her husband was guilty, no one was convicted.

Only eighteen black people live in Kingsmarkham. One of them is Wexford's new Doctor, Raymond Akande. When the doctor's daughter, Melanie, goes missing, the Chief Inspector takes more than just a professional interest in the case. Melanie, just down from university but unable to find a job, disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office and the bus stop. No one liked to voice the suspicion that something might have happened, that Melanie might be dead...

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 some ten months earlier.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. 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 illiterate housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera...

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet was what looked like a heap of rags. In a desolate subterranean car park of a Shopping Centre, Dorothy Sanders pulled back the velvet curtain revealing the grim discovery of a woman’s body. Inspector Michael Burden, for a while conducting the investigation without the help of Wexford’s intuitive genius, blunders down a number of blind alleys before uncovering the truth.

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. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.

Two damaged children: Teddy Brex, whom no-one loved, and so found it easier to relate to objects or things which never let him down; and Francine Hill, who was discovered sitting by the body of her mother, her skirt red with blood. She couldn’t tell the police or her father anything to help track down the killer.... Children grow up in different ways. Teddy became a handsome young man, Francine was beautiful - a sight for sore eyes. But it was death that brought them together.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge kills the wrong person. The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while... A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father's worst nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old daughter on the side of the road. Wexford steps into the case but soon a second teenage girl is murdered - a victim unquestionably linked to the first - and another family is shattered...

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.

Louise North doesn't care what the neighbors think. She lets her lover leave his car just outside her house in broad daylight, telling everyone he is a central heating salesman. Still, it's a shock when she's found shot dead, covered by the equally dead body of the "salesman." It was his third visit to the gloomy house on Orchard Drive. Each time, he parked in the same place. Each time, he carried a briefcase. And each time, Louise North greeted him at the door.

With floods threatening both the town of Kingsmarkham and his own home and no end to the rain in sight, Chief Inspector Wexford already has his hands full when he learns that two local teenagers have gone missing along with their sitter, Joanna Troy.

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.

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.

'I think you know who killed your stepfather', said Wexford. So begins this scintillating collection of long and short stories by Ruth Rendell. It was clear both to Wexford and Burden that Tom Peterlee was not killed for 360 pounds, but various people would have liked them to think he was... It is a case which reminds the Chief Inspector that there is only a thin line dividing the cop from the criminal.

The body found under the hedge was that of a middle-aged woman, biggish and gaunt. The grey eyes were wide and staring, and in them Detective Chief Inspector Wexford thought he saw a sardonic gleam, a glare, even in death, of scorn. But that must have been his imagination, and imagination was...

Full-cast dramatisations of seven of Ruth Rendell's tense psychological thrillers. This collection includes The Bridesmaid, Going Wrong, King Solomon’s Carpet, People Don’t Do Such Things, The Fever Tree, The Dreadful Day of Judgment and Thornapple. Among the casts of these seven suspenseful adaptations are Jamie Glover, Mark Strong, Reece Shearsmith, Paul Rhys, Danny Sapani and Juliet Aubrey.