Ruth Rendell

A young recluse, believing in the occult power of magic, will do anything to keep her family together as they grow apart   When Dolly's mother-her only friend-dies, twenty-three-year-old Dolly becomes a second mom to her younger brother, Pup. Socially isolated and booze-addled, Dolly believes that Pup's occult power, and a talisman he's made for her, will give her the life she wants. But as Pup grows older and her father takes a new wife, her carefully...

Former Chief Inspector Wexford returns from retirement to solve a most unlikely case: the mystery of who killed the three people whose corpses were last seen at the bottom of a coal hole in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999). In the decade since Franklin Merton left St. John's Wood in 1998, Orcadia Cottage has changed hands twice by the time Martin Rokeby, who wants to make room for an amphora his wife Anne found in Florence, pulls up a manhole cover in...

A beautiful woman fascinated by death insists that Philip, whose one eccentricity is a neurotic fear of death and violence, must commit murder to prove his love for her

When Stuart Font decides to throw a house warming party in his new flat he invites everyone in his building. The party will be one everyone remembers; but not for the right reasons. Living opposite, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman, christened Tigerlily by Stuart. As though from some strange urban fairytale, she emerges to exert a terrible spell on the occupants of Lichfield House.

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an 'S' rather than a 'C') is superstitious about the number 13. In musty old St. Blaise House, where he is the lodger, there are thirteen steps down to the landing below his rooms, which he keeps spick and span. His elderly landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer, was born in St. Blaise House, and lives her life almost exclusively through her library of books, so cannot see the decay and neglect around her. The Notting Hill...

In the waning 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 gardens," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, 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...