Four years after The Veiled One , Rendell's Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford returns in a superbly characterized, deftly plotted puzzler that explores the dark side of family life. A dinner-hour call for help brings Wexford and his assistants to Tancred House, where, in a chilling scene of carnage, he finds popular anthropologist and novelist Davina Flory, her husband, daughter and teenage granddaughter bleeding profusely from bullet wounds. Only young Daisy, who made the call, is alive. As she recovers, celebrates her 18th birthday and, in a willful, winning way, resumes living at Tancred House, Wexford tries to trace the two killers, who stole Davina's jewels as well. His investigation focuses first on the servants--a bitter couple whom Daisy soon dismisses, a handsome caretaker and a slow-witted neighborhood woman who later discovers the body of a local man, a petty blackmailer, hanging from a tree. While methodically seeking clues on the vast grounds of Tancred House and in nearby Kingsmarkham, Wexford is drawn to the plucky survivor, even as he grieves over his estrangement from his daughter Sheila, who is in love with an insufferable young novelist. For all the suspenseful pleasures of the plot, which includes arson and another murder, it's Rendell's characters, major and minor, who are standouts. This is among the very best from the accomplished, prolific author of The Veiled One and The Bridesmaid. 35,000 first printing; author tour. (June)

Rendell's last few books haven't been up to her extraordinarily high standard, but Chief Inspector Wexford's first appearance since The Veiled One (1988) is cause for celebration. The crime under investigation—the murder of monstrous old novelist Davina Flory, her younger MP husband Harvey Copeland, and her daughter Naomi, along with the shooting of granddaughter Daisy—is thick with mysteries beyond whodunit: What were the two criminals looking for beyond a bit of jewelry? How did they make their escape? What's happened to Naomi's business partner, Joanne Garland, and what's her connection to Daisy's father, George (Gunner) Jones? What links the killings to a fatal bank-robbery a year before? Wexford, ruefully treating Daisy as a replacement for his beloved actress daughter Sheila, who's deserted him for an obnoxious, postmodern novelist, patiently sifts the stories of the large cast, setting off the string of quiet, continuous, steadily deepening revelations of character that are the hallmark of Rendell's best work. No matter that the final revelation is at once surprising, predictable (Rendell falls back on one of the oldest clich‚s of the genre), and anticlimactic. The story marks a masterful return to form for the supreme living exponent of the English detective story.