A Ruth Rendell mystery, first published in 1979. Alan Groombridge is married to a woman he doesn't like, is a bank manager of a tiny branch, and is doomed to a life of boredom and tedious routine. All that saves him is a fantasy of stealing enough of the bank's money for just one year of freedom.
According to the London Sunday Express, Ruth Rendell is "one of the best novelists writing today." For readers new to her work, this collection of five mysteries, all cases for Detective Chief Inspector Wexford, is a perfect introduction. In Wexford, Rendell has created a rare and endearing character. Like all memorable and remarkable individuals, Wexford is a man of great intuitive power. His best performances are flashes of insight, solutions that seem more inspired by instinct than intellect.
From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is the first book to consider seriously the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nag Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, this volume introduces these authors for students and the general reader in the context of their lives, and of critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.
Nobody has a better ear for the whine of the unloved and underappreciated than Ruth Rendell. Early in this Inspector Wexford adventure, a young woman who was bound and gagged during a robbery demands victim counseling; not long after, families of some people taken hostage quickly cluster themselves into a support group. The titular "road rage" is equally timely and politically correct: protestors have gathered from around the world to stop, by whatever means they can, a new motorway that will cut through some of the woods surrounding Wexford's fictional but endearing village of Kingsmarkham.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 28 January 2011
6
Harm Done
Back in the familiar Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, Rendell's dogged sleuth Wexford is investigating the strange abductions of two young girls: Rachel, a bright middle-class student, and Lizzie, a mentally disabled 16-year-old living with her unsympathetic parents on a grim council estate. When both girls return home, apparently unharmed, Wexford is faced with a curious mystery: what really happened to them? As Wexford begins to uncover the disturbing truth, the dark psychological world that Rendell is so adroit at exploring suddenly comes into focus.
