Chief Inspector Wexford mysteries

Love and death are the only two sensational things that had ever happened to Margaret Parsons. The police knew all about her life and, by the look of it, it was very dull. Margaret Parsons had been a "good" woman--religious, old-fashioned, and respectable. But it was not her life that interested Chief Inspector Wexford, it was her death--passionate, violent, and unfathomable.

The bed was neatly made, and the woman on top neatly strangled. According to all accounts, Angela Hathall was deeply in love with her husband and far too paranoid to invite an unknown person into their home. So who managed to gain entry and strangle her without a struggle? That is the problem facing Inspector Wexford in Shake Hands Forever Maddeningly addictive, smart and surprising, Shake Hands Forever showcases Ruth Rendell at the height of her...

Inspector Wexford and his assistant Burden unravel the threads connecting the drowning of an elderly, world-renowned flautist and the murder of a woman whose identity confounds them.

Wexford is horrified by the carnage he encounters at Tancred Manor, home of a famous anthropologist, but he is determined to do all that he can for 17-year-old Daisy, the only survivor of the mass murders that obliterated her family.

After a truffle-hunting dog unearths a human hand instead of a precious fungus, Chief Inspector Wexford and his team proceed to interrogate everyone who lives nearby to see if they can turn up a match for the errant appendage among the eighty-five people who have disappeared over the past decade in this part of England. Then, when a second body is discovered nearby, Wexford experiences a feeling that's become a rarity for the veteran policeman: surprise....

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...