Ruth Rendell

The Portobello area of West London has a rich personality - vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy, with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. There is nothing safe about Portobello... Eugene Wren inherited an art gallery from his father near an arcade that now sells cashmere, handmade soaps and children's clothes.

AUDIO-BOOK Eugene Wren inherited an art gallery from his father near an arcade that now sells cashmere, handmade soaps and children's clothes. But he decided to move to a more upmarket site in Kensington Church Street. Eugene was fifty, with prematurely white hair. He was, perhaps, too secretive for his own good. He also had an addictive personality.

" Rendell is] undoubtedly one of the best writers of English mysteries and chiller-killer plots."--Los Angeles Times It was better than a hotel, this anonymous room on a secluded side street of a small country town. No register to sign, no questions asked, and for five bucks a man could have three hours of undisturbed, illicit lovemaking. Then one evening a man with a knife turned the love nest into a death chamber. The carpet was soaked with blood -- but where was the corpse? Meanwhile, a beautiful, promiscuous woman is missing--along with the bundle of cash she'd had in her pocket. The truth behind it all will keep even veteran mystery fans guessing through the very last page. Praise for Wolf to the Slaughter "The best mystery writer anywhere in the English-speaking world."--The Boston Globe "You cannot afford to miss Ruth Rendell."--The New York Times Book Review"For readers who have almost given up on mysteries . . . Rendell may be just the woman to get them started again."--Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

The twenty-first book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something slightly less savoury - a human hand.

Presents a collection of short stories from Ruth Rendell. This work comprises of stories such as: "The new Girl Friend", "The Coppper Peacock", "Blood Lines", and "Piranha To Scurfy".

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. But as their love lives start to develop, someone is murdered along the way, and long buried suspicions re-emerge with potentially tragic results.

In End in Tears, Edgar Award winning author Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford has his work cut out for him: When Mavis Ambrose is killed by a falling chunk of concrete, the police have no reason to suspect mischief. However, the bludgeoning of the young and gorgeous Amber Marshalson that follows is clearly murder. In the midst of the hottest summer on record, Inspector Wexford is called in to investigate. He discovers the two cases may be linked, and that Amber was at the scene of Mavis's death. When a third body is found, the case takes a disturbing and unexpected turn. The deeper Wexford digs, the darker the realities become, and what he finds leaves him feeling lost in a world absent of morals.

Dazzling psychological suspense. Razor-sharp dialogue. Plots that catch and hold like a noose. These are the hallmarks of crime legend Ruth Rendell, "the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world" (Time magazine). From Doon with Death, now in a striking new paperback edition, is her classic debut novel -- and the book that introduced one of the most popular sleuths of the twentieth century. There is nothing extraordinary about Margaret Parsons, a timid housewife in the quiet town of Kingsmarkham, a woman devoted to her garden, her kitchen, her husband. Except that Margaret Parsons is dead, brutally strangled, her body abandoned in the nearby woods. Who would kill someone with nothing to hide? Inspector Wexford, the formidable chief of police, feels baffled -- until he discovers Margaret's dark secret: a trove of rare books, each volume breathlessly inscribed by a passionate lover identified only as Doon. As Wexford delves deeper into both Mrs. Parsons' past and the wary community circling round her memory like wolves, the case builds with relentless momentum to a surprise finale as clever as it is blindsiding. In From Doon with Death, Ruth Rendell instantly mastered the form that would become synonymous with her name. Chilling, richly characterized, and ingeniously constructed, this is psychological suspense at its very finest. "One of the most remarkable novelists of her generation." --People"She has transcended her genre by her remarkable imaginative power to explore and illuminate the dark corners of the human psyche." --P.D. James

Three classic Ruth Rendell stories: Means of Evil, The Fallen Curtain and The Fever Tree. Ruth Rendell is unequalled in her ability to weave stories that challenge our preconceptions and prejudices.

The twentieth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person.

A serial killer known as the "Rottweiler" stalks the young women of an ethnically diverse London neighborhood near Lisson Grove, and the only clue lies in the trinkets taken by the killer from each victim as a macabre souvenir, items that start to turn up amid the clutter of a local antique shop. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an 'S' rather than a 'C') is superstitious about the number 13. In the musty old house where he is the lodger, there are thirteen steps down to the landing below his rooms, which he keeps spick and span. His elderly landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer, was born in St Blaise House, and lives her life almost exclusively through her library of books, so cannot see the decay and neglect around her. The Notting Hill neighbourhood has changed radically over the last fifty years, and 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders, has been torn down. Mix is obsessed with the life of Christie and his small library is composed entirely of books on the subject. He has also developed a passion for a beautiful model who lives nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence.

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. Their hysterical mother is convinced that all three have drowned, and as the hours stretch into days Wexford suspects a case of kidnapping, perhaps connected with an unusual sect called the Church of the Good Gospel. But when the sitter's smashed-up car is found at the bottom of a local quarry-occupied by a battered corpse-the investigation takes on a very different hue. The Babes in the Wood is Ruth Rendell at her very best, a scintillating, precise and troubling story of seduction and religious fanaticism-and murder.

The latest body was discovered very near Inez Ferry's antique shop in Marylebone. Trinkets very similar to those mysteriously appearing in Inez's shop. Since her actor husband died, too early into their marriage, Inez supplemented her modest income by taking in tenants above the shop.

The River Brede had burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley had escaped flooding. The teenagers are fifteen and thirteen, the sitter's in her thirties, they can all swim and the house is miles above the floods. There hadn't been anything like this kind of rain in living memory. The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles.

Minty's boyfriend, Jock, was killed in the disastrous train wreck at Paddington, shortly after he borrowed all her savings. Now he has come back to haunt her. Zillah lost her estranged husband, Jerry, in that same accident. She is not convinced he is actually dead, but for reasons of her own decides not to pursue the matter. Fiona's fianc , Jeff, has simply disappeared-quite inexplicably since she was supporting him in style. In her ingeniously unnerving new novel, Ruth Rendell deftly traces the connections among these women-and between them a series of vicious stabbings terrifying London. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is a masterpiece of malice and psychological suspense.

Nine deliciously frightening and exquisitely crafted tales of psychological terror from Ruth Rendell. A self-appointed critic reads books only to catch out their errors of fact and usage, which he points out to their authors in vicious letters: Then one day he comes upon a book that attacks him. An elderly woman finally avenges herself on the man who raped her sixty years before. An idyllic village in the English countryside offers newcomers its own peculiar kind of hospitality and exacts a terrible price on those who reject it. Delivering high-voltage shocks with the elegance of a Henry James, Piranha to Scurfy is further evidence of Ruth Rendell's mastery of any form she puts her hand to.

"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved?" This old nursery rhyme is a favorite of Jerry Leach, a handsome ne'er do well, who sponges off women. Five women, unknown to each other, are his willing victims. But Jerry, almost accidentally, becomes the victim of one of his female prey.