Ruth Rendell

When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair--until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend. A devilishly handsome novelist, James Derain resembles Cary Grant, but his strident comments about Grace's doctoral thesis...

"Both a finely crafted mystery and a disturbingly honest depiction of the kinship between love and madness, The Brimstone Wedding tells an unsettling story about the power and the poison of love. A gracious, dignified woman, who's dying in an English nursing home, reveals the secrets of her erotic past to her young caretaker." -- Amazon.com

Love and death are the only two sensational things that had ever happened to Margaret Parsons. The police knew all about her life and, by the look of it, it was very dull. Margaret Parsons had been a "good" woman--religious, old-fashioned, and respectable. But it was not her life that interested Chief Inspector Wexford, it was her death--passionate, violent, and unfathomable.

Wexford had every reason to remember the Painter case - it was the first murder he'd ever handled on his own. There had been no doubts about the case, until now. Someone wants the case reopened, and they want Wexford proved wrong.

His marriage failing and his father seemingly going mad, Stephen Whalby finds the bodies of two women on the bleak Vangmoor and his sense of terror and menace spreads throughout the villages.