Ruth Rendell – Page 2 – Carol's Notebook

Author: Ruth Rendell

Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (February 17, 1930 – May 2, 2015) was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.

Rendell’s best-known creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, was the hero of many popular police stories, some of them successfully adapted for TV. But Rendell also generated a separate brand of crime fiction that deeply explored the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. This theme was developed further in a third series of novels, written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine.

A New Lease of Death (also published as Sins of the Father) by Ruth Rendell is the first book I've read, well listened to actually, in her Detective Wexford series. I'm not sure that it was the best choice of a first read in the series simply because Wexford seemed more of a secondary character; I have to assume that's not usually the case. He seemed like an interesting man, gruff, but I didn't really get much of a feel for him or his sidekick, Burden. The main character was a vicar, Henry Archery, whose son wants to marry a lovely young woman. The problem lies in the fact that she is the daughter of Painter, a man who was convicted of killing an elderly woman and hung for the crime. The story was originally published in 1967 when the class difference between the two young people was an issue, but not as much as the potential of the tendency for violence...