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Rendell Ruth
The Vault: An Inspector Wexford Novel
 List Price: Price: $6.31 You Save: $19.69 (76%) DescriptionFrom “the reigning queen of crime fiction” (Time Out), a sequel to A Sight for Sore Eyes, one of Rendell’s most beloved novels—featuring the retired Inspector Wexford.In the stunning climax to Rendell’s classic A Sight for Sore Eyes, three bodies—two dead, one living—are entombed in an underground chamber beneath a picturesque London house. Twelve years later, when a manhole cover is pulled back, the house’s new owner makes a grisly discovery. Only now, the number of bodies is four. How did somebody else end up in the chamber? And who knew of its existence? With their own detectives at an impasse, police call on former Chief Inspector Wexford, now retired and living with his wife in London, to advise them on the unsolved murders. Wexford, missing the thrill of a good case, jumps at the chance to sleuth again. His dogged detective skills and knack for figuring out the criminal mind take him to London neighborhoods, posh and poor, as he follows a complex criminal trail back to the original murders. But just as Wexford’s case gets hot, a devastating family tragedy pulls Wexford back to Kingsmarkham, and for the first time in his life, Wexford finds himself transforming from investigator into victim. Masterfully plotted, The Vault will satisfy both longtime Wexford fans and new Rendell readers.
Veiled One
 List Price: Price: $4.36 You Save: $3.63 (45%) DescriptionWho would garrote a middle-aged housewife and leave her body in the parking garage of a suburban shopping mall? Chief Inspector Wexford is no sooner on the case than a car bomb's explosion lands him in the hospital. It's now up to Mike Burden to step in and solve the case. He's got a suspect . . . but will he be able to make him talk?
Tigerlily's Orchids: A Novel
 List Price: Price: $3.89 You Save: $22.11 (85%) DescriptionIs it dangerous to know too much about your neighbors? In Tigerlily’s Orchids, Diamond Dagger Award–winning Ruth Rendell has written psychologically thrilling novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a London terrace—about the secrets they keep, and what they will do to hide them.When Stuart Font decides to throw a housewarming party in his new flat, he invites all the people in his building—three flippant young girls, a lonely spinster, a man with a passion for classical history, and a woman determined to drink herself to death. After some deliberation, he even includes the unpleasant caretaker and his wife. He considered inviting a few other friends, but he definitely does not want his girlfriend, Claudia, in attendance, as he would also have to invite her lawyer husband. As it turns out, the party will be one everyone remembers. Living in a townhouse opposite Stuart’s building, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman known as Tigerlily. As though from some strange urban fairytale, she emerges infrequently to exert a terrible spell. And Stuart’s parents, always worried about their handsome, hopelessly naive, and undermotivated son, have even more cause for concern. Darkly humorous, piercingly insightful about human behavior, Ruth Rendell, whom People magazine calls “one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation,” has created an extraordinarily compelling story of our lives and crimes.
A Sight for Sore Eyes
 List Price: Price: $4.32 You Save: $3.67 (46%) DescriptionTeddy was born in squalor. Now he is a craftsman determined to banish ugliness from his life. Harriet is a beautiful, bored trophy wife who employs a series of repairmen for her sexual satisfaction. And Francine is a college student who witnessed her mother's murder and now must free herself from her father's manipulative second wife. Connected by strands of chance, their lives intersecting in the strangest of ways, these three people are on a journey that will bring them to each other--and to a beautiful ivy-covered home with at least one dead body in the basement....Nobody does North London squalor better than Ruth Rendell. Describing in vivid detail the cultural sewer in which a monster named Teddy Brex grows up, she uses hideous furniture, slovenly housekeeping habits, even his mother's diet while pregnant to root us in the setting's hopeless ugliness. In contrast, Rendell introduces people and places of stunning beauty: Francine, a mentally fragile girl who became mute after witnessing her mother's murder; and Orcadia Cottage, scene of a famous painting that is at the center of much of the story's anguish. "It was far and away the most beautiful place he had ever seen," Rendell writes when Teddy--a gifted woodcrafter--first views the cottage. "The proportions of this hall, this room... the windows, the walls, the carpets, the flowers, the furniture, the paintings, all of it dazzled him." Teddy is another of Rendell's frightening moral cripples, a seemingly ordinary person capable of the vilest crimes. When he becomes obsessed with Francine after meeting her at art school, we know to expect murder--we just aren't sure when, or who will be the victim. Equally vile is Julia, Francine's stepmother, a psychologist of such immense and malevolent ineptness that we would swear she couldn't possibly exist if real life hadn't taught us otherwise. Other important characters are Harriet, a faded beauty who connects the past to the present; Teddy's uncle Keith, who first recognizes the boy's madness; and a bright red, lovingly restored Edsel, which becomes a hearse. Like all of her books, Rendell's latest is really about the secret acts of insanity that occur behind closed doors. Among her best books available in paperback are From Doon with Death, A Guilty Thing Surprised, The Keys to the Street, and, from the excellent Inspector Wexford series, Kissing the Gunner's Daughter, Road Rage, and Simisola. --Dick Adler Rendell Ruth News
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Back StagePlaying ShakespeareIn his episode on rehearsing, we can watch Barton coach Dench as Viola in Twelfth Night—opposite Richard Pasco (A Dance to the Music of Time) as Duke Orsino, Michael Williams (A Fine Romance) as Curio, and Norman Rodway (Ruth Rendell Mysteries) as
guardian.co.ukThe Lighthouse by PD James"I don't think a detective writer will ever win the Booker," though she cited some of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine books as examples of "crime mysteries" that had deserved to make it on to a Booker shortlist. What about other types of genre fiction