Ravens are not particularly predatory birds, but neither are they soft and submissive. The collective noun for them is an ‘unkindness’...The raven is a symbol used by a feminist group whose...

Messages were coming in thick and fast - messages that were never intended for John Creevey. He thought he had intercepted a major crime ring. He would never know that he was dealing with a group...

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...

In a gloomy London cemetery a girl is found murdered – a girl with a name that isn’t hers, a girl with no friends, no possessions and no past. It shouldn’t have been a case for Detective...

The Portobello area of West London has an edge to it. There is nothing safe about Portobello.

Eugene Wren was fifty, with prematurely white hair. He also had an addictive personality....

There hadn’t been anything like this kind of rain in living memory. The River Brede had burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley had escaped flooding. Even where Wexford lived,...

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......

Sir Manuel Carmargue, one of the greatest flautists of his time, was dead. Misadventure: an old man, ankle-deep in snow, he lost his foothold in the dark, slipping into the water to be trapped...

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury – a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped...

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a small stone bridge over a quiet road kills the wrong person. The driver behind is spared. But only for a while...It is impossible for Chief...

Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coachhouse in Hampstead, belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila. Wexford takes...

The First Chief Inspector Wexford Mystery.

Love and death – the only two sensational things that had ever happened to Margaret Parsons. 
The police knew all about her life and, by...

Only 18 black people live in Kingsmarkham. One is Wexford’s new doctor. When the doctor’s daughter goes missing, the Chief Inspector takes more than a mere professional interest in the case,...

With deceptive economy in these nine short stories, Ruth Rendell indicates hidden depths in ordinary events and creates a sense of profound unease. The stories are: 'A Pair of Yellow Lilies',...

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. In prison, inevitably, he reflected on the grotesque way it had begun, about the panics and violent anger. He...