Ruth Rendell (Barbara Vine) Books in Order

Grace Easton, a university lecturer studying unmarried mothers in Victorian fiction, shares an inherited Hampstead house with her brother Andrew. When Andrew's boyfriend moves in and Grace reads a manuscript about a 1930s scandal, old prejudices around illegitimacy and homosexuality begin to play out with dangerous force in their own lives.

Rising Tory MP Ivor Tesham arranges a mock kidnapping as an extravagant birthday surprise for his married lover Hebe, but the game ends in a fatal crash. Years later, anonymous letters, guilty witnesses and shifting political fortunes threaten to expose his part in the disaster.

Young nurse Kerstin Kvist moves into Lydstep Old Hall, a decaying Essex mansion, to care for John Cosway, an adult son kept heavily sedated by his domineering family. As she questions his treatment, she is pulled into the Cosways' jealous quarrels, locked rooms and a dangerous family secret.

Martin Nanther, a modern Lord and biographer, sets out to write about his great grandfather, a Victorian expert on blood diseases and royal physician. Tracing the family's history of haemophilia, he uncovers a pattern of deaths that suggests his ancestor's brilliance hid something monstrous.

After a tragic fall from an electricity pylon, nineteen year old Clodagh Brown is sent to London to start again. Joining a group who roam the city's rooftops at night, she finds love, freedom and the unnerving sense that another disaster is waiting high above the streets.

When acclaimed novelist Gerald Candless dies suddenly, his adoring daughter Sarah agrees to write his biography. Researching the man she thought she knew, she discovers that his name, childhood and family history were all inventions, and that his reinvention hides a forgotten crime.

Care home aide Jenny Warden hides an affair and a miserable marriage behind a calm face. Her bond with Stella, a dying resident with a vanished lover and a secret house, draws Jenny into a decades old story of passion, control and a possible murder that echoes her own life.

Beautiful young art historian Paul Hazlitt accepts a lucrative job cataloguing a millionaire's collection of Mesoamerican art. His increasingly uneasy letters from the estate hint at strange rituals, and when he disappears, the people left behind must decide what they are willing to believe.

Tim Cornish, a clever but unreliable young man, writes a private confession about the older lover who supported him and the woman he met on an Alaskan cruise. His story of passion, betrayal and a struggle on a remote island circles a question he cannot bear to answer.

When the sharp, funny diaries of Danish immigrant Asta Long are rediscovered, her descendants become fascinated by the voice on the page. As they translate and investigate, the notebooks' casual entries lead toward an old child's murder and unsettling truths about identity and belonging.

Jarvis Stringer studies the London Underground and lets rooms in a derelict schoolhouse by the tracks. The misfits who gather there, from runaway musicians to thrill seeking teenagers and a vigilant hawk keeper, are gradually pulled together by the tube network into a chain of accidents and deliberate harm.

Suicidal and adrift, Joe is hauled from the path of a train by charismatic Sandor, who demands lifelong loyalty in return. Drawn into Sandor's plan to kidnap glamorous Nina, Joe finds himself trapped in a web of obsession, dependence and escalating violence.

Novelist Lizzie Vetch spots her old friend Bell from a taxi and impulsively follows her, despite the terrible history between them. Remembering their bohemian years in her aunt's London townhouse, she slowly unravels the jealousies and betrayals that ended in prison and tragedy.

When human bones are found in the pet cemetery of Wyvis Hall, Adam and his former friends know the discovery points back to their hedonistic summer there in 1976. Forced to confront buried guilt, they relive a season of love, lies and a fatal choice.

Years after her aunt Vera is hanged for murder, Faith Severn agrees to revisit the scandal that scarred her family. As she pieces together wartime memories, she uncovers a dangerous rivalry between two sisters and the child who stood between them.