Including the Ruth Rendell short story 'Catamount'.

Barbara Vine's new novel, her first since The Birthday Present in 2008, is an intriguing examination of betrayal in a family, and of those two once-unmentionable subjects, illegitimacy and homosexuality. Set in London and in Devon now and more than half a century ago, it shows vividly how society's attitudes and mores have changed in many respects - yet stubbornly remain the same in others.

The distinguished crime writer Ruth Rendell was so frightened after she read it she had to keep her bedside lamp on all night.

Many recent retirees will understand why Ruth Rendell's familiar protagonist, Reg Wexford, is feeling a bit aimless in the early pages of The Vault.

Life in the well-manicured London locale of Hexam Place is not as placid and orderly as it appears. Behind the tranquil gardens and polished entryways, relationships between servants and their employers are set to combust.

Henry, the handsome valet to Lord Studley, is sleeping with both the Lord’s wife and his university-age daughter. Montserrate, the Still family’s lazy au pair, is helping to hide Mrs. Still’s illicit affair with a television actor—for a small fee. June, the haughty housekeeper to a princess of dubious origin, is hard at work forming a “society” for servants to address complaints about their employers. Meanwhile, a disturbed gardener, Dex, believes a voice in his cellphone is giving him godlike instructions—that could endanger the lives of all who reside in Hexam Place.

Like deft, elegant, Golden Age-ish detective fiction? Like Pride and Prejudice? Then have I got news for you. On November 3, Faber is publishing Death Comes to Pemberley: a crime novel set in Jane Austen's universe by none other than PD James.

Wexford, a devoted grandfather who sends his very first email here, is the antithesis of the artistic and autistic Teddy Brex, the creepy student protagonist of A Sight for Sore Eyes. The Vault, as a sort-of-sequel, is a bold attempt to combine Rendell's two chosen specialities: the police procedural and the psychological thriller.

The Sense of an Ending, the new novel by Julian Barnes about the fortunes of a group of school-friends, is brief but masterful, says Anita Brookner.

Some authors formerly represented by PFD have asked publishers to start rerouting their royalty payments to breakaway company United Agents. But PFD c.e.o. Caroline Michel has warned authors and publishers against the move.

This incredible Ruth Rendell Collection is filled with thrilling crime tales, punctuated by fascinatingly complex plotlines. Including the first ten novels in her popular Inspector Wexford series, reissued with new glossy jackets, this set is great as an introduction to the famous author’s work or as a reminder of her talents for those that have read these captivating crime thrillers in the past.

In this Culture Show special, Sue Perkins investigates crime and experiences 'new romance' in an attempt to discover the essential ingredients of a bestselling novel.

Along the way, Sue also meets bestselling authors Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, Anthony Horowitz and Joanne Harris along with some of the UK's biggest crime, thriller and romance fans to find out what they like best about their favourite authors.

BBC2's Faulks on Fiction (all episodes are available on iPlayer) may have taken a fairly traditional approach in terms of the show's structure and use of talking heads, but it also allowed us to hear fictional characters – and not just the obvious British literary icons – discussed at unusual length. Ruth Rendell got rather defensive of Zoë Heller's Barbara Covett, despite the latter's permanent air of frosty disapproval.

New York Times bestselling author Ruth Rendell won't label her characters as psychotic. “Disturbed perhaps, neurotic,” she says, “but not mad. I have known too many people like this to label them mad.”

BERNHARD Schlink is the author of The Reader, a haunting parable of German guilt about the Holocaust that is also a convincing portrait of the coming together of a teenage boy and a mature woman.

Virago is publishing a new collection of 13 early short stories by Daphne du Maurier, including five discovered by a Cornish bookseller and du Maurier enthusiast.

A new Wexford Novel

RT @holmesnews: Ruth Rendell Discusses Sherlock Holmes - Faulks on Fiction Ep 1: The Hero …

Patti Smith writing detective novel via @guardian

From Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler,
Andrew Vachss to Ruth Rendell, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard publishes the finest in classic crime fiction and suspense writing available today.

Among the guests are: the Duchess of Devonshire, actors Larry Lamb and Elizabeth McGovern, comedians Sarah Millican and Hardeep Singh Kohli, authors PD James and Jeanette Winterson, and TV and radio favourites Sue Perkins, Giles Coren, Clare Balding, Richard Bacon and Sir Trevor McDonald.

Simon Brett says that in the golden age of mysteries, Hercule Poirot would get them all in the library and point at one person and say ‘For zees reazons you deed it…’ and they’d go off and be hanged. But now, without the death penalty, the ramifications of crime and punishment are gone into far more.

Published by Hutchinson on 4 Aug 2011.

Hard Case Crime brings you the best in hardboiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today’s most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style.

The 2010 Book Video Awards celebrate four outstanding new Crime and Thriller books via striking video trailers produced by leading young film makers from the National Film & Television School.

Iconic film company Hammer Films has teamed up with Random House imprint Arrow to publish a new list, with Jeanette Winterson writing one of the first titles.

Best-selling American author Donna Leon says success is overrated as she cherishes her anonymity in Venice, the setting of her mystery series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti.

Rendell’s greatest trick is making an unforeseen outcome feel predestined.

Ruth Rendell's novels of London amount to a modern cultural history of the city – a fictional urban archaeology of Holland Park in the hippie-chick era, redbrick terraces before and after the attentions of the "property ladder". Now she turns her sharp powers of observation on to a small suburban block of private flats, very precisely located in the social scale, too far away from the centre to be really expensive, just a cut above council housing. Rendell charts the local changes in sharp detail: the closure of the local off-licence, the problems of Mr Ali's corner shop.

London writer Emma Donoghue takes a totally different tack in a book about female sexuality as played out in love relationships between women in the Western literary tradition. Donoghue's treatise is a sharp departure from her readable and widely lauded novels,Slammerkin, Life Mak, Landingandfie Sealed Lette

Literary critic Barbara Fass Leavy's The Fiction of Ruth Rendell: Ancient Tragedy and the Modern Family aims to explain the multi-layered themes of Ruth Rendell's work and establish Rendell's position as a major novelist worthy of serious literary acclaim.

“My characters sometimes try to take over a plot and I have to crush them,” said the novelist, who lives in Maida Vale. “You have to remember what Graham Greene said about authors of fiction: ‘There’s always a little splinter of ice in them.’ He meant that you could be at the deathbed of a dear and close friend or relative and you would be taking down notes.”

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell Rendell's thriller turns on chance encounters, the most important of which occurs in the Odeon cinema at Marble Arch.

To celebrate World Book Day, Quick Reads is exclusively offering one title – The Thief by Ruth Rendell – as a free download for one week only from 4th March 2010.

non-fiction book based on the events that inspired Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is due to be published by HarperCollins, announced The Bookseller on February 17. Written by Terence O'Neill, whose story and court testimony inspired Christie's play, Someone to Love Us will be published on March 4 (April 1 in Australia).

Murder mysteries, once looked down on, are now fit for the literary elite

Any of 22 authors, including Iris Murdoch and Joe Orton, could be awarded the coveted Lost Man Booker prize for novels that missed out due to rule changes in 1971

Crime fiction experts Barry Forshaw and Laura Wilson pick the essential reading list

Acclaimed crime writer Ruth Rendell will discuss with David Grylls the latest edition of the Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, for which she has supplied the introduction. How important has Holmes been in the history of detective fiction? What differences does she see between Conan Doyle's great detective and her own sleuth, Chief Inspector Wexford? Would she ever kill off her own creation?

Lord Melvyn Bragg, Ruth Rendell, Joe Orton, Iris Murdoch and HE Bates are among the novelists in the running for a special Lost Man Booker Prize - for works published in 1970 which "fell through the net".

Iris Murdoch's "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" is up against 21 other works, including "The Fire Dwellers" by Margaret Laurence, Len Deighton's "Bomber," ''A Guilty Thing Surprised," by Ruth Rendell, and "A Clubbable Woman," by Reginald Hill.

Henning Mankell may have fancied a change of detective but Roslin is no Wallander, finds Mark Sanderson .

Why a forensic psychiatrist describes the Get Into Reading project as the most significant development in mental health practice in the last 10 years.

Grief-stricken author ends award-winning crime series after actress who played Wallander's daughter takes her own life

New standalone Rendell in 2010.