Blood Lines

Innocence is in the eye of the beholder.... A collection of short stories, ranging from crimes of passion and violence in Kingsmarkham to a bizarre murder in Yugoslavia, featuring the world-famous Detective Chief Inspector Wexford. A crime omnibus from the world's greatest living mystery writer, Ruth Rendell.

The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Nine years on, she and her sister, Heather, still live in the same house in Clapham. But it has been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lives upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy drowned, has disappeared. Ismay works in public relations, and Heather in catering. They get on well. They always have. They never discuss the changes to the house, still less what happened that August day.

In a gloomy cellar, the figure of a beautiful, pale woman makes no move when the man advances on her from the shadows, puts his hands around her neck and strangles her. Arthur Johnson is a mild-mannered, shy man who has never known how to talk to women. His resulting loneliness has twisted his yearning for love and respect into a carefully constructed predilection for violence and control.

Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. In prison, inevitably, he reflected on the grotesque way it had begun, about the panics and violent anger. He asked himself, too, why the child of happily married, middle-class parents should have needed to make motiveless and unreasoning attacks on women. Holed up in that house with the girl, he had not meant to pull the trigger. It was panic.

Four members of the Coverdale family - George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles - died in the space of fifteen minutes on the 14th February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later she was arrested for the crime. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there...

Like most families, they had their secrets...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the '50s was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.

It was meant to be a harmless stag-night prank. A few hours later Michael Harrison has disappeared, and his friends are dead. With only three days to the wedding, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace - a man haunted by the shadow of his own missing wife - is contacted by Michael's beautiful, distraught fiancée, Ashley Harper. Grace discovers that the one man who ought to know Michael Harrison's whereabouts is saying nothing.

The discovery of two teenage girls' bodies and a video of a snuff movie showing the death of one of the victims leaves Detective Inspector Jack Frost in a race against time before the killer can strike again.

The first girl had a bite mark on her neck, but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler' and the name stuck. The latest murder takes place very near Inez Ferry's antique shop in Marylebone. When the Rottweiler’s trinkets start showing up in the shop, suddenly, everyone Inez knows is a suspect, and the killer feels all too close.

A wealthy woman strangled six hours after she's arranged her own funeral. A very private detective uncovering secrets but hiding his own. A reluctant author drawn into a story he can’t control. What do they have in common? Unexpected death, an unsolved mystery and a trail of bloody clues lie at the heart of Anthony Horowitz's new thriller. Spread the word. The word is murder.

On a freezing morning four drunken students stumble upon the body of a woman in the snow. Rosie has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in a cemetery. The only suspects are the four young men now stained with her blood. Twenty-five years later the police mount a cold-case review of Rosie’s unsolved murder, and the four are still suspects. But when two of them die in suspicious circumstances, it seems that someone is pursuing their own brand of justice....

Previously uncollected and unpublished: new short stories from a master of psychological suspense. New and uncollected tales of murder, mischief, magic and madness. Ruth Rendell was an acknowledged master of psychological suspense: these are 10 (and a quarter) of her most chillingly compelling short stories, collected here together for the first time.

Two damaged children: Teddy Brex, whom no-one loved, and so found it easier to relate to objects or things which never let him down; and Francine Hill, who was discovered sitting by the body of her mother, her skirt red with blood. She couldn’t tell the police or her father anything to help track down the killer.... Children grow up in different ways. Teddy became a handsome young man, Francine was beautiful - a sight for sore eyes. But it was death that brought them together.

Three very different women come together at isolated Baikie’s Cottage on the North Pennines to complete an environmental survey. Rachael, the team leader, is still reeling after a double betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. Anne, a botanist, sees the survey as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace, a strange, uncommunicative young woman hiding plenty of her own secrets.