Ruth Rendell

Mix Cellini has just moved into a flat in a decaying house in Nottinghill, where he plans to pursue his two abiding passions—supermodel Nerissa Nash, whom he worships from afar, and the life of serial killer Reggie Christie, hanged fifty years earlier for murdering at least eight women. Gwendolen Chawcer, Mix’s eighty-year-old landlady, has few interests besides her old books and her new tenant. But she does have an intriguing connection

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A young recluse, believing in the occult power of magic, will do anything to keep her family together as they grow apart   When Dolly's mother-her only friend-dies, twenty-three-year-old Dolly becomes a second mom to her younger brother, Pup. Socially isolated and booze-addled, Dolly believes that Pup's occult power, and a talisman he's made for her, will give her the life she wants. But as Pup grows older and her father takes a new wife, her carefully...

Chief Inspector Wexford is walking through Framhurst Great Wood, just outside his beloved town of Kingsmarkham, for what he tells himself will be the last time. He can no longer bear to look at the natural beauty that will soon be despoiled by the construction of a new highway. Wexford rather despairs of the project; his more sanguine wife, Dora, is active on a committee to save the threatened land. Others are more desperate to achieve their end,...

While searching for a missing person, Inspector Wexford discovers multiple murders of victims who resemble the missing girl leading him to reevaluate his ideas about race and gender relations.

Wexford is horrified by the carnage he encounters at Tancred Manor, home of a famous anthropologist, but he is determined to do all that he can for 17-year-old Daisy, the only survivor of the mass murders that obliterated her family.

Once Guy and Leonora were lovers. Now it's over but Guy can't forget ... or forgive. Every day he calls Leo with fantasies about their love and their future. All she wants is him out of her life.

Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not so sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny is afraid their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better -- after all, Luke has her to take her mother's place. But then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancee, and Elvira decides that she will stop at nothing to stop her father's marriage.