Set in and around London's Regent's Park, where the city's wealthiest, poorest, kindest, and most vicious citizens all cross paths, The Keys to the Street tells of the deadly thanks a young woman risks receiving in return for an act of selfless generosity."Is it true that we dislike those who have done us a service?" asks Mary Jago's grandmother. One of many questions about the best and worst of human nature, it is one with an answer Mary will discover for herself as a consequence of donating her own bone marrow to save the life of a young man she doesn't know...."It's us he's after," says Dill, "our sort." Dill's sort are the homeless who seek refuge in the park, whose corpses have lately been turning up impaled on the spiked railings that surround it....Mary is not their sort at all and would under ordinary circumstances be separated from such horror by social barriers stronger than iron bars. But she has performed a bold act, and the circumstances of...

When a young man moves into a recently inherited Suffolk manor house, he falls into a summer idyll that gathers friends and strangers alike—and concludes in murder When the new owners of Wyvis Hall go to bury a dear pet dog, they stumble upon a ghastly relic left by the home's previous occupants: the bones of a woman and a small child, hastily interred. So opens a mystery set in motion a decade before when nineteen-year-old Adam Verne-Smith inherited the property and spent one debauched summer there with friends and a few aimless drifters. While most of Wyvis Hall's visitors that summer would go on to live respectable lives, two would never leave. Now, investigators must piece together not only whodunit, but also to whom it was done, in this brilliantly constructed thriller.

When a body of a middle-aged woman is found under a hedge, Inspector Wexford finds he has very little information to pursue the case. From the author of AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS and THE VEILED ONE.

The award-winning author of The Babes in the Wood and The Rottweiler brings us another terrifically paced, richly drawn novel of suspense and psychological intrigue. Weeks went by when Ismay never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The dream always began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated towards her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, “Don't look!”The dead man was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Now, 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 had lived upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy had drowned, had disappeared. Ismay worked in public relations, and Heather in catering. They got on well. They always had. They never discussed the changes to the house, still less what had happened that August day. . . But even lives as private as these, where secrets hang in the air like dust, intertwine with other worlds and other individuals. And, with painful inevitability, the truth will emerge.

A spectacularly compelling story of blackmail, murders both accidental and opportunistic, and of one life’s fateful unraveling from Ruth Rendell—“one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation” (People)—writing at her most acute and mesmerizing.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 three was selling fifty of those diet pills to a friend, who is then found dead.Dermot seizes a nefarious opportunity and begins to blackmail Carl, refusing to pay rent, and creepily invading Carl’s space. Ingeniously weaving together two storylines that finally merge in one shocking turn, Ruth Rendell describes one man’s spiral into darkness—and murder—as he falls victim to a diabolical foe he cannot escape.This is masterful storytelling that gets under your skin, brilliant psychological suspense from Ruth Rendell. “No one surpasses Ruth Rendell when it comes to stories of obsession, instability, and malignant coincidence” (Stephen King).Read More

A Ruth Rendell mystery, first published in 1979 and shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime novel in 1980. Alan Groombridge is trapped. Husband to a woman he doesn't like, father to two children he never wanted, and manager of a tiny branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank, he is doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine. All that keeps him afloat is his one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom - one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day the bank is robbed, the manager and cashier disappear and what was once a place of dull and dreary repetition becomes the scene of a brutal, chilling nightmare that might never end...

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 up almost completely ignored. Free of societal mores, he becomes a sociopath, who eventually discovers that killing can be an effective way to get what he wants. Thirdly, we meet Harriet, who from an early age has learned to use her beauty to make her way in the world. Bored by marriage to a wealthy, much older man, she scans the local newspapers for handymen to perform odd jobs around the house, including services in the bedroom.When these three plots strands finally converge, the result is harrowing and unforgettable. A...

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. Susan Townsend was the only resident with no interest in the affair going on next door, or in the neighbourhood gossip about it. Yet it was Susan who found the murdered bodies of the lovers, locked not in passion, but in death. And it was Susan whose own life would be imperilled by a monstrous crime far beyond the imaginings of the vilest gossiping tongues. A classic Rendellian murder mystery.