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',...

For a while the pop festival at Sundays went well. The sun shone, the groups played and everyone - except a few angry neighbours -seemed to enjoy themselves. Then the weather changed, and a young...

The Chinese government wanted advice on crime prevention and detection, and Scotland Yard’s Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune has assembled a team that includes the best detection experts, bar...

Who would have believed that Alice Whittaker’s life could change? She was thirty-seven, rich but dowdy, with no career. Her life was a lonely failure, though she had got by with the one thing...

This case is proving a difficult one for Chief Inspector Wexford. All he has to go on are his own intuitive suspicions. Was he becoming cynical and untrusting or was this one of the most ingenious...

Two years ago he had been a promising young novelist. Now he survived in a near derelict cottage with only his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla - the rich, unstable...

There are only two things in life that interest Stanley - solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law’s money. For twenty years, the puzzles have been his only...

The title story is about a man whose life, in a sense, is a book. Life for Ambrose Ribbon is lonely and obsessive without his mother, yet there is one book that he associates particularly with her...

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet was what looked like a heap of rags. In the desolate subterranean car park of the Barringdean Shopping Centre, Reg Wexford had been too preoccupied to...

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...

Anita Margolis had vanished. There was no body, no crime – nothing more concrete than an anonymous letter and the intriguing name of Smith. According to headquarters, it wasn’t to be...

Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not as sad as her younger sister, Spinny. Spinny is afraid their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better...

Once when Benet was about fourteen they had been on a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It was some time now since Benet had seen her mad...

Jock Lewis was supposed to have died in the Paddington rail crash - Minty had received a letter from Great Western. But, curiously, the police hadn't been in touch. And Jock had gone off with all...

Philip Wardman had more than just the ordinary squeamishness where death was concerned. Yet he could hardly avoid the suspicious disappearance of his sister's friend Rebecca Neave, especially when...