Ruth Rendell

A nurse is enlisted to care for the mysterious patriarch of a country estate in this "elegant and gripping" novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The Washington Post).

No sooner does young Swedish nurse Kerstin Kvist arrive for her live-in position at Lydstep Old Hall, an isolated estate deep in the Essex countryside, than she's warned: "There's madness in the family." Specifically, it's that of

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"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...

At first there was no reason to link the killings. The first one, months earlier, seemed totally random: a lump of concrete pushed off an overpass onto a passing car. By contrast, the gruesome bludgeoning death of Amber Marshalson, returning home late from a night out clubbing with friends, was obviously calculated. The killer had been seen waiting for the girl in a nearby wood. But when Chief Inspector Wexford discovers that Amber had been the driver...

The Monster in the Box is the latest addition to Ruth Rendell's classic and beguiling Inspector Wexford series. In this enthralling new book, Rendell, "the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world" (Time), takes Inspector Wexford back to his days as a young policeman, and to the man he has long suspected of murder - serial murder. Outside the house where Wexford investigated his first murder case - a woman found strangled in her bedroom

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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, higher up in Kingsmarkham, the waters had nearly reached the mulberry tree in his once immaculate garden. The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles and Sophie Dade, let alone the woman who was keeping them company, Joanna Troy. But Mrs. Dade was still

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Few mystery writers can match Ruth Rendell's ability to get inside the dark, tangled psyches of everyday criminals. Rendell takes a single emotion-in this case a sister's all-consuming jealousy-and shows how even the most unsuspicious people are capable of the worst kind of horrors.

Discover a world of heroes and villains, suspense and intrigue. This riveting and comprehensive collection brings together some of the best crime writing of all time. Ruth Rendell and Frances Hegarty spearhead the modern genre, moving through the popular and rarely recorded Graham Greene, to Edgar Wallace and G.K. Chesterton and his master detective Father Brown. And that's not all.

Stories included:

Loopy by Ruth Rendell,...