It was better than a hotel, this anonymous room on a secluded side street of a small country town. No register to sign, no questions asked, and for five bucks a man could have three hours of undisturbed, illicit lovemaking.

Then one evening a man with a knife turned the love nest into a death chamber. The carpet was soaked with blood -- but where was the corpse?

Meanwhile, a beautiful, promiscuous woman is missing -- along with the bundle of cash she'd had in her pocket. The truth behind it all will keep even veteran mystery fans guessing through the very last page.

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.

Here are five classic Wexford cases that display his remarkable ingenuity and that of his creator. Ranging from the more everyday crimes of passion and violence in quiet Kingsmarkham, to a bizarre murder in Yugoslavia, each is a case which challenges Detective Chief Inspector Wexford's considerable imagination and resourcefulness, and the patient reasoning of the long suffering Burden."

Children and young people spend a great deal of their time in schools and other education settings. Consequently those working in such contexts have a huge impact and influence on the development, experiences and thinking of the children and young people with whom they interact.This book represents the bringing together of the richness and variety of ideas shared by some of the contributors to the first European Conference on Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Education Settings, held in Paris in 2005 and hosted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. The event was intended to...

"Dazzling...writing at her formidable best, Barbara Vine taps the poetry as well as the pain of her characters' clamorous declarations of their need for love." --New York Times Book Review
"When the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world launched a second byline, she actually stepped up her writing a level." --TIME
Faith Severn has grown up with the dark cloud of murder looming over her family. Her aunt Vera Hillyard, a rigidly respectable woman, was convicted and hanged for the crime, but the reason for her desperate deed died with her. Thirty years later, a probing...

INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL'S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS

From "one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation" (People) a "refined, probing, and intelligent" (USA TODAY) mystery in the masterful Inspector Wexford series...more enthralling than ever after fifty years.

A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. A single mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was working in a male-dominated profession. Moreover, she was of mixed race and wanted to modernize the church. Could racism or sexism have played a factor in...

Murder, corruption, blackmail. All these are part of someone else's world, not part of the everyday lives of ordinary people...or are they? This is a collection of sinister stories from the bestselling author who won "The Sunday Times" Literary Award for 1990.

"A spectacularly creepy and macabre tale" (Entertainment Weekly) of blackmail, murders both accidental and opportunistic, and of one life's fateful unraveling--from Ruth Rendell, "one of the most remarkable novelists of her generation" (People), writing at her most mesmerizing. Rendell completed Dark Corners shortly before her death in 2015.

When his father dies, Carl Martin inherits a house in an increasingly rich and trendy London neighborhood. Cash poor, Carl rents the upstairs room and kitchen to the first person he interviews, Dermot McKinnon. That is mistake...

Previously uncollected and unpublished: new short stories from a master of psychological suspense.