No Man's Nightingale: the eagerly anticipated twenty-fourth title in Ruth Rendell's bestselling Detective Chief Inspector Wexford series. Sarah Hussain was not popular with many people in the community of Kingsmarkham. She was born of mixed parentage — a white Irishwoman and an immigrant Indian Hindu. She was also the Reverend of St Peter's Church. But it comes as a profound shock to everyone when she is found strangled in the Vicarage. A garrulous cleaner, Maxine, also shared by the Wexfords, discovers the body. In his comparatively recent retirement, the former Detective Chief Inspector is devoting much time to reading, and is deep into Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He has little patience with Maxine's prattle. But when his old friend Mike Burden asks if he might like to assist on this case as Crime Solutions Adviser (unpaid), Wexford is obliged to pay more precise attention to all available information. The old instincts have not been blunted by a life where he and Dora divide their time between London and Kingsmarkham. Wexford retains a relish for solving puzzles and a curiosity about people which is invaluable in detective work. For all his experience and sophistication, Burden tends to jump to conclusions. But he is wise enough to listen to the man whose office he inherited, and whose experience makes him a most formidable ally.

The seventh book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. 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. Under strict orders from his doctor to indulge in no criminal investigation, Wexford is sent to London for a break away from the pressures of the Kingsmarkham police force. But then he discovers that 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 absue, he relentlessly pursues this sinister new lead...

‘It was the first murder case I ever investigated on my own.’ Wexford said angrily. ‘There’s no mystery. Herbert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the head with an axe. He did it for two hundred pounds.’ Chief Inspector Wexford was sure that the murder of an old lady had been carried out by her employee, Herbert Painter, and the courts agreed with him. But then Henry Archery, whose son is engaged to marry Painter’s daughter, starts questioning the case …

'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 coachhouse 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 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 GBP40,000. 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.

‘It was the first murder case I ever investigated on my own’. Wexford said angrily. ‘There’s no mystery. Herbert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the head with an axe. He did it for two hundred pounds.’ Chief Inspector Wexford was sure that the murder of an old lady had been carried out by her employee, Herbert Painter, and the courts agreed with him. But then Henry Archery, whose son is engaged to marry Painter’s daughter, starts questioning the case…

From one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation (People) comes a psychologically thrilling novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a London apartment building, the secrets they keep, and how knowing too much about one's neighbors might be deadly.

This is the dazzling new novel from Ruth Rendell. When the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, an investigation into a long buried crime of passion begins. And a group of friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. For Woody, anger was cold. Cold and slow. But once it had started it mounted gradually and he could think of nothing else. He knew he couldn't stay alive while those two were alive. Instead of sleeping, he lay awake in the dark and saw those hands. Anita's narrow white hand with the long nails painted pastel pink, the man's brown hand equally shapely, the fingers slightly splayed. Before the advent of the Second World War, beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their secret place. Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved on or disappeared. Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a grisly secret, buried a lifetime ago, and a weary detective, more preoccupied with current crimes, must investigate a possible case of murder. In all her novels, Ruth Rendell digs deep beneath the surface to investigate the secrets of the human psyche. The interconnecting tunnels of Loughton in The Girl Next Door lead to no single destination. But the relationships formed there, and the incidents that occurred, exert a profound influence — not only on the survivors but in unearthing the true nature of the mysterious past.