| RUTH RENDELL - DCI WEXFORD | ||
| YEAR |
TITLE |
|
| 1964 | \ |
FROM DOON WITH DEATH: Margaret
Parsons is dead. She appeared to lead a very dull life. She had been a
"good" woman. Religious, old-fashioned, and respectable, her life had
been as spotless and ordinary as her home, as unexciting and dependable
as her marriage.However, it was not because of her life that Chief
Inspector Wexford got involved, but her death... How is it possible
that a woman who had led such a quiet, respectable, unspectacular life
could have met such a death of passion and violence? To Wexford, it
simply does not make sense, until he begins to slowly uncover the
layers of Margaret Parsons' real life... R83 RR96 |
| 1967 |  |
A NEW LEASE OF DEATH (aka SINS OF THE FATHERS): It's
impossible to forget the violent bludgeoning to death of an elderly
lady in her home. Even more so when it's your first murder case.
Wexford believed he'd solved Mrs Primero's murder fifteen years ago. It
was no real mystery. Everyone knew Painter, her odd-job man, had done
it. There had never been any doubt in anyone's mind. Until now ...Henry
Archery's son is engaged to Painter's daughter. Only Archery can't let
the past remain buried. He wants to prove Wexford wrong and in probing
into the lives of the witnesses questioned all those years ago, he
stirs up more than old ghosts. R83 |
| 1967 |  |
WOLF TO THE SLAUGHTER: Anita
Margolis had vanished. There was no body, no crime - nothing more
concrete than an anonymous letter and the intriguing name of Smith.
Inspector Burden could see exactly what had happened to Anita Margolis.
Not only had Anita been wealthy and flighty, she had been thoroughly
immoral as well. Decent women were either married or had jobs, or both.
They didn't bring lovers home in the afternoon. They also knew enough
to keep their money in the bank, not in their handbags. Chief Inspector
Wexford, however, had other ideas. R83
RR87
|
| 1969 |  |
THE BEST MAN TO DIE: Jack Pertwee
was getting married in the morning, and the Kingsmarkham and District
Darts Club gathered in the Dragon to give him a send off. Charlie
Hatton drove his lorry eleven hours down from Leeds just to be there.
Charlie was Jack's best friend and he would be his best man. When the
two finally parted at the Kingsbrook bridge, Jack felt as though his
life was just beginning. But for Charlie Hatton life was about to end.
Detective Chief Inspector Wexford wondered why the fatal Fanshawe car
accident kept upsetting his concentration on the Hatton murder. There
couldn't be a connection. Fanshawe had been a wealthy stockbroker;
Charlie Hatton had been a cocky little lorry driver with some illegal
dealing. But was it just a coincidence that Hatton had been killed on
the day following that of Mrs Fanshawe's regaining consciousness? R83 |
| 1970 |  |
A GUILTY THING SURPRISED: The
Nightingales were always a very happy couple. If a husband and wife
never discuss anything but the weather, are waited on hand and foot,
are childless and physically cold, what is there to quarrel about? But
someone must have had reason to quarrel with Elizabeth. Someone who was
alone with her in the woods that dark September night. Someone who
either loved her or hated her so much that they beat her head in until
she was dead. The Nightingale case seemed straightforward enough on the
surface, but coming closer everything began to shift and change.
Detective Chief Inspector Wexford soon discovered that beneath the
placid surface of the Nightingales' lives there were undercurrents and
secrets no one had ever suspected. Wexford was more than baffled: every
little thing seemed to prove his theories wrong. These days it seemed
to him that he was always wrong ... R81 |
| 1971 |  |
NO MORE DYING THEN: On a stormy
February afternoon, little Stella Rivers disappeared - and was never
seen again. There were no clues, no demands and no traces. And there
was nowhere else for Wexford and his team to look. All that remained
was the cold fear and awful dread that touched everyone in
Kingsmarkham. Just months later, another child vanishes - five-year-old
John Lawrence. Wexford and Inspector Burden are launched into another
investigation and, all too quickly, chilling similarities to the Stella
Rivers case emerge. Then the letters begin. Horrifying, evil,
threatening letters of a madman. And suddenly Wexford is fighting
against time to find the missing boy, before he meets the same fate as
poor Stella. R78 |
| 1972 | j |
MURDER BEING ONCE DONE: It seems
fitting that the final resting place of a girl's body should be in a
graveyard. But this is no peaceful burial. This is a brutal murder
scene. On strict orders from his doctor, Wexford is sent to London for
a break away from the pressures of the Kingsmarkham constabulary. But
then he discovers his nephew Howard is heading the investigation into
the macabre murder of Loveday Morgan, whose body was found abandoned in
Kenbourne Cemetery. Despite opposition from Howard and his team Wexford
is drawn to the case. And when he unearths Loveday's connection to a
religious cult whose leader was imprisoned for sexual abuse, he
relentlessly pursues this sinister new lead.... R81
|
| 1973 |  |
SOME LIE AND SOME DIE: When the body
of a brutally beaten girl is found in a quarry during a hedonistic
hippy festival at Sundays near Kingsmarkham, Wexford is first on the
scene. The victim's face has been pulped by the back-end of a bottle,
but who, in this atmosphere of peace and love, could be capable of such
violence? The body is that of local girl turned stripper, Dawn Stonor,
but it is the unlikely link between this ill-fated girl and the
mysterious folk-singer, Zeno Vedast, that pique Wexford's interest.
Through a web of lies and deceit Wexford uncovers a history of love and
hate that began years earlier, and he realises that never has he
witnessed a murder of such desperate passion... R81 |
| 1975 |  |
SHAKE HANDS FOR EVER: Past masters
at cherishing a sense of grievance, totally lacking the gracious touch
- that was the Hathall family. When accountant Robert Hathall took his
bristling old mother down to Kingsmarkham for a weekend, the idea was
to create better feeling between her and Robert's second wife, Angela.
But when they arrived, there was no Angela to meet them in her car at
the station and mother and son had to walk to Hobart's cottage where
there was still no sign of Angela - until Mrs Hathall went upstairs and
found the strangled body on the bed. Chief Inspector Wexford took
charge of the investigation. The house offered few clues and from the
start Wexford felt dissatisfied with Robert's behaviour and reactions.
Had Angela really been the victim of an intruder? Who was the other
woman in Robert's life? And whose was the strange female hand-print on
the side of the bath? The trail leads Wexford to London and to a
solution as satisfying as it is bizarre. R78 RR91 |
| 1978 |  |
A SLEEPING LIFE: On a sultry August
evening, the bloody body of a middle-aged woman is discovered beneath a
hedge by a small boy. There are only two things that surprise Wexford
about the murder scene. One, that the only contents of the woman's
handbag are some keys and a wallet containing nothing but some money.
And two, how even in death, her deathly grey eyes possess a scornful
glare. The woman turns out to be Rhoda Comfrey, but there's no murder
weapon, no apparent motive, and no one who actually cares she's died.
Wexford's only hunch is that the clues to her murder must lie in her
solitary London life. But her existence there becomes frustratingly
impossible to trace. R82 |
| 1981 |  |
PUT ON BY CUNNING (aka DEATH NOTES): Sir Manuel
Camargue, yesterday one of the most celebrated musicians of his time,
today floats in the lake near his sprawling English country house. The
consensus is "tragic accident." Inspector Wexford, that most human and
dogged of sleuths, knows foul play when he smells it. Particularly in
the fair company of two suspects - one, the victim's fiancee who is too
young to be true, the other his daughter who may be no kin and even
less kind. In California and the South of France they lead the
Inspector on a trail of disappearance and death to a place where all
the music stops. R82 RR89
|
| 1983 |  |
THE SPEAKER OF MANDARIN: Chief
Inspector Wexford returns from his trip-of-a-lifetime to China, only to
be haunted by his memories of the old woman with bound feet following
him from one city to the next and the man who tragically drowned. Now,
back in England, he finds himself investigating the murder of a fellow
tourist. His investigative instincts keep leading him back to the East,
a place more mysterious than he had ever imagined. R? |
| 1985 |  |
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS: An
“Unkindness” is the collective noun for a group of ravens. They are not
particularly predatory birds, but neither are they soft and
submissive. Now, the Raven has become the symbol of a militant feminist
group known as Arria, whose attitude to the male gender is, like the
nature of said bird, far from submissive.When Chief Inspector Wexford
was asked to investigate the disappearance of his neighbour Rodney
Williams he was certain it was just a case of another middle-aged man
having run-off with a young woman. All the signs pointed that way. A
waste of time to concern yourself with, his thoughts tell him. However,
he would be shocked to his core when, weeks later, Rodney’s
disappearance turns out to be the centre of a violent and bizarre
murder. R85 |
| 1988 |  |
THE VEILED ONE: The woman's body lay
between a silver Escort and a dark-blue Lancia. Concealed by a shroud
of dirty brown velvet, it looked like a heap of rags. In the desolate
subterranean car park of the Barringdean Shopping Centre, Reg Wexford
had been too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary, just
the time and a red car driving past him, rather too fast. Burden called
him at home with the grim news later that evening. The woman had been
attacked from behind, perhaps with a thin length of cord or wire.
Before Inspector Wexford can delve deeper into this curious homicide,
he, too, faces death. And Burden, for a while conducting the
investigation without the help of his chief’s instinctive analytical
genius, will blunder down a number of blind alleys. The Veiled One is
dark, complex and full of surprises…R88 |
| 1991 |
AN UNWANTED WOMAN: Originally
published
in
the
collection
THE
COPPER PEACOCK and Other Stories R91 |
|
| 1992 |  |
KISSING THE GUNNER's DAUGHTER:
Friday the thirteenth of May is the unluckiest day of the year. It is
the day Sergeant Caleb Martin of Kingsmarkham CID confiscates a replica
gun from his son's school briefcase. It is the day he will lose his
life in a bank robbery, and the first link in the chain of events that
will lead to a number of deaths. When three people are discovered shot
at Tancred House, Chief Inspector Wexford comes to believe there is a
connection between the two apparently unrelated crimes. But only the
seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the victims survives to provide
the most confusing of clues. Wexford is much taken with Daisy Flory -
especially after a rift which has occurred between him and his
favourite daughter, Sheila. But this unusual feeling does not prevent
Wexford's deductive powers from functioning with their customary
intuitive precision … R92 |
| 1994 |  |
SIMISOLA: There are only eighteen
black people living in Kingsmarkham. One is Wexford's new doctor,
Raymond Akande, who took over the retiring Dr Crocker's practice. When
the doctor's daughter, Melanie, goes missing, the Chief Inspector takes
more than just a professional interest in the case. Melanie had only
just left university, and, unable to find a job, had been to sign on
social security. She disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office
and the bus stop. Or at least no one saw her get on the bus when it
came. According to her parents, Melanie was happy at home. She had
recently broken up with her boyfriend, but, until now, there had been
no cause to worry about her. And no one liked to voice the suspicion
that something dreadful might have happened, that Melanie might be dead
.... Against a background of rising unemployment and social change,
Wexford is involved in a case which tests not only his powers of
deduction, but his basic beliefs and prejudices. R94 |
| 1995 |  |
BLOOD LINES and Other
Stories: Behind the quiet patterns of everyday life, lie the
frailties and desires, the deceptions and guilty secrets of ordinary
men and women. In this powerful new collection of long and short
stories Ruth Rendell probes their lives with unerring and disturbing
insight. BLOOD LINES (DCI Wexford); LIZZIE'S LOVER; SHREDS AND SLIVERS;
BURNING END; THE MAN WHO WAS THE GOD OF LOVE; THE CARER; EXPECTATIONS;
CLOTHES; UNACCEPTABLE LEVELS; IN ALL HONESTY; THE STRAWBERRY TREE.
R97 |
| 1997 |  |
ROAD RAGE: A by-pass is planned in
Kingsmarkham that will destroy its peace and natural habitat for ever.
Dora Wexford joins the protest, but the Chief Inspector must be more
circumspect: trouble is expected. As the protesters begin to make their
presence felt, a young woman's badly decomposed body is unearthed.
Burden believes he knows this murderer's identity but Wexford is not
convinced. Furthermore, having just become a grandfather, he is
struggling to put aside his familial responsibilities and emotions in
order to do his job. The case progresses, the protest escalates. And
alarmingly, a number of people begin to disappear, including Dora
Wexford ...R98 |
| 1998 |  |
HARM
DONE: On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police and
her
family and neighbours had already begun to search for her body. She had
been missing for three days. A short while later, another young woman
disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the
community. The residents of the Muriel Campden Estate are up in arms,
and even prepared to take the law into their own hands ... Chief
Inspector Wexford is not only concerned very personally with the
effects of violence and prejudice, but is involved with a new programme
called Hurt-Watch, to help the victims of domestic violence. His
daughter, Sylvia, the social worker, and never his favourite, has come
to work nearby in a refuge for battered women, called The Hide. Her
marriage is also in difficulties, although her husband has never raised
a hand to her. They are merely incompatible. Other women in
Kingsmarkham are not so lucky, and, after those early disappearances,
two far more serious crimes are committed which will affect the lives
and attitudes of police and public alike. R99 |
| 2002 |  |
THE BABES IN THE WOOD: 'I've just
heard a crazy thing, thought it might amuse you. You look as though you
need cheering up.' Burden seated himself on the corner of the desk, a
favourite perch. Wexford thought he was thinner than ever. 'A woman
phoned to say she and her husband went to Paris for the weekend,
leaving their children with a - well, teen-sitter, I suppose, got back
last night to find the lot gone and naturally she assumes they've all
drowned.' 'That's amusing?' 'It's pretty bizarre, isn't it? The
teenagers are fifteen and thirteen, the sitter's in her thirties, they
can all swim and the house is miles above the floods.' 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 convinced her children were dead. This was an
investigation which would call into question many of Wexford's
assumptions about the way people behaved, including his own family ...R02 |
| 2005 |  |
END IN TEARS: A lump of concrete
dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively
unfrequented road kills the wrong person. The driver behind is spared.
But only for a while ... It is impossible for Chief Inspector Wexford
not to wonder how terrible it would be to discover that one of his
daughters had been murdered. Sylvia has always been a cause for
concern. Living alone with her two children, she is pregnant again.
What will happen to the child? The relationship between father and
daughter has always been uneasy. But the current situation also
provokes an emotional division between Wexford and his wife, Dora. One
particular member of the local press is gunning for the Chief
Inspector, distinctly unimpressed with what he regards as old-fashioned
police methods. But Wexford, with his old friend and partner, Mike
Burden, along with two new recruits to the Kingsmarkham team, pursue
their inquiries with a diligence and humanity that make Ruth Rendell's
detective stories enthralling, exciting and very touching. R05 |
| 2007 |  |
NOT IN THE FLESH: Searching for
truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury -
a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later,
has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton sheet.
The post-mortem cannot reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue
is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs. The police computer stores a
long list of missing persons. Men, women and children disappear at an
alarming rate, something like 500 every day nationwide. So Wexford
knows he is going to have a job on his hands to identify the corpse.
And then, only twenty yards away from the woodland burial site, in the
cellar of a disused cottage, another body is found. The detection
skills of Wexford, Burden and the other investigating officers of the
Kingsmarkham Police Force are tested to the utmost to discover whether
the murders are connected and to track down whoever is responsible. R07 |
| 2009 |  |
THE MONSTER IN THE BOX: Wexford had
never told anyone. The strange relationship, if it could be called
that, had gone on for years, decades, and he had never breathed a word
about it. He had kept silent because he knew no one would believe him.
None of it could be proved, not the stalking, not the stares or the
conspiratorial smiles, not the killings, not any of the signs Targo had
made because he knew Wexford knew and could do nothing about it.
Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes
on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in
Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years
earlier, when Wexford was a young police officer, a woman called Elsie
Carroll had been found strangled in her bedroom. Although many had
their suspicions that her husband was guilty, no one was convicted.
Another woman was strangled shortly afterwards, and every personal and
professional instinct told Wexford that the killer was still at large.
And it was Eric Targo. A psychopath who would kill again ... As the
Chief Inspector investigates a new case, Ruth Rendell looks back to the
beginning of Wexford's career, even to his courtship
of the
woman who would become his wife. The past is a haunted place, with
clues and passions that leave an indelible imprint on the here and now.
R09
|
| 2011 |  |
THE VAULT: ‘Don’t forget,’ Wexford said, ‘I’ve lived in a world where the improbable happens all the time.’ However, the impossible has happened. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coach-house in Hampstead, belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila. Wexford takes great pleasure in his books, but, for all the benefits of a more relaxed lifestyle, he misses being in the law. But a chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case. The bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal-hole of an attractive house in St John’s Wood. None carries identification. But the man’s jacket pockets contain a string of pearls, a diamond and a sapphire necklace, as well as other jewellery valued in the region of £40,000. It is not a hard decision for Wexford. He is intrigued and excited by the challenge, and, in the early stages, not really anticipating that this new investigative role will bring him into extreme physical danger. Note: This is the sequel to A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES - 1998. R08/11 |