Both Benjamin Black and Ruth Rendell have written inviting new novels filled with nicely malevolent characters. It hardly seems sporting to relegate these books to the murder-story genre just because some of those characters wind up dead of unnatural causes.

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.

Ruth will be reading from her new novel 'Tigerlily's Orchids' at England's Lane Books in Hampstead on Thursday 16 September at 7.30pm.