Tree Of Hands: a compulsive and darkly compelling psychological thriller from the award winning Queen of Crime, Ruth Rendell

Description

Once when Benet was about fourteen she and her mother had been alone in a train carriage - and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It was some time since Benet had seen her mad mother. So when Mopsa arrived at the airport looking drab and colourless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tried not to hate her. But then the tragic death of a child begins a chain of deception, kidnap and murder.

Ruth Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, and will be remembered as a legend in her own lifetime. Her groundbreaking debut novel, From Doon With Death, was first published in 1964 and introduced the reader to her enduring and popular detective, Inspector Reginald Wexford, who went on to feature in twenty-four of her subsequent novels. With worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, Rendell was a regular Sunday Times bestseller. Her sixty bestselling novels include police procedurals, some of which have been successfully adapted for TV, stand-alone psychological mysteries, and a third strand of crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Very much abreast of her times, the Wexford books in particular often engaged with social or political issues close to her heart. Rendell won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for 1976's best crime novel with A Demon in My View, a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986, and the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer. Ruth Rendell died in May 2015. Her final novel, Dark Corners, is scheduled for publication in October 2015

Rendell's psychological novels remain in a class of their own * Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph * Ruth Rendell has quite simply transformed the genre of crime writing. She displays her peerless skill in blending the mundane, commonplace aspects of life with the potent murky impulses of desire and greed, obsession and fear * Sunday Times * The web is spun with fiendish skill * Observer * Domestic dramas exploding into deaths and murders - Threads are drawn tightly together in a lethal last pattern * Sunday Times * One of the greatest novelists presently at work in our language... A writer whose work should be read by anyone who either enjoys a brilliant mystery - or distinguished literature * Scott Turow *