Böcker av Ruth Rendell

The twelfth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. Wherever Reggie Wexford goes, death and intrigue are close on his heels.

There are only two things in life that interest Stanley: solving crossword puzzles, and getting his hands on his mother-in-law's money. And in all those years it has never once occurred to Stanley that she would try to outsmart him and the money might never be his.

When her mother, Eve, tells Liza that she must leave their remote home, the gatehouse of a country mansion, Liza is terrified. She has almost no knowledge of a world described by her mother as evil and destructive. Their strange, enclosed life together is over because Eve has killed a man. And he is not the first.

The fifteenth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. The thirteenth of May is famously the unluckiest day of the year.

But the gossip is elevated to new heights when young Patrick Selby dies on the very night of his beautiful wife's birthday party. The whole neighbourhood was there, witness to the horrible attack of wasp stings Patrick suffered at the end of the evening.

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles - died in the space of fifteen minutes on the 14th February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the illiterate housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television.

Her white face stared blankly back at him. He fancied that she had cringed, her slim body pressing further into the wall behind her. There had been only one thing he had ever been able to do to women and, advancing now, smiling, he did it.

Two years ago he had been a promising young novelist. Now he survived - you could hardly call it living - in a near derelict cottage with only an unhooked telephone and his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla - the bored, rich, unstable girl with everything she needed, and a husband she wanted dead. . .