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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

Few people under the age of seventeen have read the whole of Virgil in Latin and witnessed two murders. But Liza Beck is no ordinary teenager. She has grown up alone with her mother, Eve, in the remote gatekeeper's cottage of magnificent Shrove House. Here Liza has been nourished by books and her mother's obsessive love, carefully shielded from the "contamination" of the outside world. No newpapers, no TV, no phone, no car, no school.

Liza knows perfectly well she can never leave Shrove House, or her mother, to go with the handsome young drifter who tends the garden. Then one day the police come and take Eve away forever--and now Sean Holford will find out, little by little, all about Liza's past and her mother's fierce, mysterious claim to Shrove House. And to his growing horror, he'll learn about all the men who came there-and never left alive.