Book description
The twentieth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective,
Chief Inspector Wexford.
A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge
over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person. The young
woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while...
A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father's worst
nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old
daughter on the side of the road.
As a man with a strained father-daughter relationship himself,
Wexford must struggle to keep his professional life as a detective
separate from his personal life as husband and father. Particularly
when a second teenage girl is murdered - a victim unquestionably
linked to the first - and another family is shattered...
Ruth Rendell is crime writing at its very best. The author of over
50 novels, she has won many significant crime fiction awards. Her
first novel, From Doon With Death, appeared in 1964, and since
then her reputation and readership have grown steadily with each new
book.
She has received major awards for her work; three Edgars from the
Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award for
1976's best crime novel, A Demon in My View; the Arts Council
National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for The Lake of
Darkness; the Crime Writer's Gold Dagger Award for 1986's best
crime book for Live Flesh; in 1987 the Crime Writer's Gold
Dagger Award for A Fatal Inversion and in 1991 the same award
for King Solomon's Carpet, both written under the pseudonym
Barbara Vine; the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990; and in
1991 the Crime Writer's Cartier Diamond Award for outstanding
contribution to the crime fiction genre.
Her books are translated into 21 languages. In 1996 she was awarded
the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.
