The Fallen Curtain And Other Stories

Description

A nail-biting collection of short murder mystery stories, from the world's best living crime writer and author of bestselling psychological thrillers, including Thirteen Steps Down. A collection of Ruth Rendell psychologically chilling murder mysteries. A wife plots her husband's psychological destruction - then his murder; a son is ruined by his mother's obsession; a man marries the woman he rescues from suicide, only to become the victim of her obsessiveness; and a family feud brings unimaginable horror.

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, was published in October 2015.

She can make a scene between two women sitting in a cafe as violent as anything you've seen between a couple of guys with baseball bats * Mark Billingham * Wonderful at exploring the dark corners of the human mind, and the way private fantasies can clash and explode into terrifying violence * Daily Mail * Ruth Rendell gets into the mind not only of the hero but into the mind of the villain * Jeffery Deaver * Rendell's eerier capacity to comprehend disturbed criminal minds continues to astonish * The Times * Once her characters start twisting on every-tightening tracks, their fates are brilliantly sealed, and it's never obvouis who'll be the victim or the culprit. Rendell's greatest trick is making an unforeseen outcome feel predestined * Financial Times *