Ruth Rendell

A woman investigates the shocking secrets that brought down her once proud family in this suspenseful Edgar Award winner from a New York Times–bestselling author.
Faith Severn has never understood why the willful matriarch of her high-society family, aunt Vera Hillyard, snapped and murdered her own beloved sister. But long after Vera is condemned to hang, a journalist’s startling discoveries allow Faith to perceive...

Wexford investigates when a five-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl disappear from the village of Kingsmarkham and then one is found dead.

A female Vicar named Sarah Hussain is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham Vicarage. Maxine, the gossipy cleaning woman who finds the body, happens to also be in the employ of former Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and his wife. When called on by his old deputy, Wexford, who has taken to reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a retirement project, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. Wexford is intrigued by the...

In the wanting months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood.Throughout the summer of 1944--until one father forbids it--the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decadeslater, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female. As the discovery makes national...