End in tears A Wexford novel

Review by Booklist Review

A rich cast of characters makes up for the mechanical plot in Rendell's twentieth Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, starring the shrewd, grandfatherly detective and his handsome, considerably younger sidekick, Burden. As the novel opens, teenage mother Amber Marshalson has been found bludgeoned to death by the side of a rural English road (the killer, as it turns out, twice tried to end her life, first dropping a lump of concrete onto a silver car he had mistaken for hers). Soon after, a young, pregnant acquaintance of Amber is murdered. The suspects are numerous: a pair of peculiar twins; a heavily pierced and tattooed boyfriend; a thin, hooded figure seen lurking in the nearby woods. Meanwhile, Inspector Wexford has problems of his own; his daughter, Sylvia, has agreed to be the surrogate mother for her ex-husband's new wife. Prolific three-time Edgar winner Rendell (who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine) proves a master at rendering the joys and sorrows of human relationships, from amicable marriages to the cruel practice of preying on sterile women desperate to have children. --Allison Block Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestseller Rendell's riveting new novel in her Chief Inspector Wexford series (The Babes in the Wood, etc.) links two disparate worlds-a child-surrogacy ring and the construction trade. A teenage mother, Amber Marshalson, is found dead in the grass outside her home in Kingsmarkham, her skull crushed by a piece of brick. A short time later, Amber's pregnant friend, Megan Bartlow, turns up murdered in a seedy, about-to-be-rehabbed Victorian row house. Suspicions center on a tall man wearing a hooded fleece jacket. Against this sinister backdrop stands Wexford, who's in lion-in-winter mode. He's irked and perplexed by modern life, by the casual way young girls conceive babies, by the sprawl devouring the once-lush Sussex countryside, even by his own fractious family. But he never loses the anger and dedication that propel him to solve crimes and understand evil. While Rendell fans may find this not quite up to the level of her most recent non-Wexford, Thirteen Steps Down (2005), they should be well satisfied. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Whether writing as Barbara Vine or under her own name, Rendell (Thirteen Steps Down) is an icon in the mystery-writing genre. With more than 50 novels to her credit, she shows no signs of slowing down or losing her touch. In this, her 20th Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, Rendell lays out a complex story of murder in which maternal instinct goes awry. From two seemingly unrelated deaths to an intricate scam promising surrogacy services to hopeful parents, the plot is so complicated (and sometimes happenstance) that even the detectives in the story don't get it until the all-knowing Wexler explains it to them. Rendell continues to amaze with her ability to tie together seemingly unrelated plot lines and throw readers off. The tone is typically no-nonsense, with only a few token side trips into the personal lives of the protagonists. Rendell (and Wexford) fans will enjoy this latest offering, provided they can keep the impressively large cast of characters sorted out. Recommended for all public libraries. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Inspector Reginald Wexford's 20th case, and Rendell's 64th volume, asks who murdered a pair of Kingsmarkham teens no better than they should have been. Last June, a hooded figure tried to kill 18-year-old mother Amber Marshalson by tossing a block of concrete onto her car from an overpass. The resulting accident led to a fatality, but it wasn't Amber. Now, two months later, the killer has struck more effectively. On the way home from the Bling-Bling Club, Amber's been beaten to death with a brick that could have come from anywhere. As Wexford, DS Hannah Goldsmith and their colleagues (The Babes in the Wood, 2003, etc.) methodically begin to interrogate witnesses and potential suspects--the neighbors of Amber's adoring father and hostile stepmother, the friends she went clubbing with, the well-connected family of her baby's father--Rendell sets about bringing each of them to startling life. She lavishes equal care on the members of Wexford's own family, led this time by his daughter Sylvia, who's quixotically determined to carry a baby for her ex-husband, Neil, and his girlfriend, Naomi. Soon enough, the murderer claims a new victim, pregnant shop clerk Megan Bartlow, whose connection with Amber isn't hard to find. But it'll be months before Wexford emerges from an intricate web of red herrings to identify a sadly amateurish scam and a surprising killer. Average for Rendell's distinguished list of whodunits, which makes it just a whisker below state of the art. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 When he lifted it off the seat the backpack felt heavier than when he had first put it into the car. He lowered it on to the soft ferny ground. Then he got back into the driving seat to move the car deep into a cave made by hawthorn bushes and brambles, and the hop vines which climbed over everything in this wood. It was late June and the vegetation very dense and luxuriant. Getting out again and standing back to take a good look, he could barely see the car. Probably he only saw it because he knew it was there. No one else would notice it. He squatted down, hoisted the backpack up on to his shoulders and slowly stood up to his full height. The movement reminded him of something and it was a moment before he realised what it was: lifting up his little son to sit on his shoulders. A hundred years ago, it seemed. The backpack was lighter than the boy but felt heavier to him. He was afraid that if he stood upright the pack would jerk him backwards and break his spine. Of course it wouldn't. It just felt that way. All the same, he wouldn't stand upright, wouldn't even try it. Instead, he stooped, bending almost double. It wasn't far. He could walk like this the two hundred yards to the bridge. Anyone seeing him from a distance in this half-light would have thought him a humpbacked man. There was no one to see. The twisty country lane wound round Yorstone Wood and over the bridge. He could have brought the car right up to the bridge but that way it would have been seen, so he had driven off the lane along a ride and then through a clearing to find the hop-grown cave. In the distance he thought he heard a car, then something heavier with a diesel engine. They would be on the road below, Brimhurst Lane that ran from Myfleet to Brimhurst Prideaux, passing under Yorstone Bridge ahead of him. It wasn't far now but it seemed like miles. If his legs gave way he wouldn't be able to get up again. Would it be easier to drag the backpack? What, then, if he met someone? Dragging something looks much more suspicious than carrying it. He pressed his shoulders back a little and, surprisingly, that was better. There was no one to meet. He could see the lane through the trees and the little stone bridge no one had reinforced with steel or replaced with a brightly painted wooden structure. Its parapets were low, too low for safety, according to the local paper. The paper was always on about this bridge, and the dangers of the lane and the low parapets. He walked out on to the bridge, squatted down and let the backpack slip off his shoulders to the ground. He undid the flaps and then the zip. Inside, now revealed, was a lump of concrete, very roughly spherical, a bit bigger than a soccer ball. A pair of gloves was also inside the pack. To be on the safe side, he put them on. Though it would never come to anyone examining his hands, it would be stupid to scrape or bruise them. What light remained was fading fast and with the coming of the dark it grew cooler. His watch told him that it was nine fifteen. Not long now. He lifted up the lump of concrete in his gloved hands, thought of balancing it on the parapet in readiness, then thought again. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that someone would come along the path he had used and cross the bridge. Wait for the call, he thought. It won't be long now. No traffic had passed along the road below since he had come on to the bridge but a car came now, going towards Brimhurst Prideaux, most probably all the way to Kingsmarkham. He closed his hand over the mobile in his pocket, worried because it hadn't rung. Then it rang. 'Yes?' 'She's left. You want the number again?' 'I've got it. A silver Honda.' 'Right.' 'A silver Honda. Should be along in four minutes.' He heard the line close. It was dark now. A car passed under the bridge, heading towards Brimhurst St Mary and Myfleet. The road dipped where the bridge passed over it and then twisted to the left, almost a right-angled bend. There were tall trees on the corner with thick ancient trunks and a black and white arrow sign opposite, pointing traffic to the left. A minute had passed. He moved across to the other side of the bridge, dragging the backpack behind him, and there he bent down, heaved up the lump of concrete, his arms straining, and set it on the parapet. Just as well it wasn't far to lift it. Another minute gone. A white van with headlights on at full beam came from the Myfleet direction, a car following it, to pass, just behind him, a motorbike coming from Kingsmarkham. He was momentarily blinded by the headlights, held in them, which made him curse. No one should see him. The silver Honda with the number he had memorised would be along soon, very soon. The third minute passed. A fourth. He hated anticlimaxes. The silver Honda could have taken another route. It was all very well to say it never did but you could never say that, not when it came to the way people behaved. He was facing the way it would come, towards Myfleet. It would pass under the bridge but before it reached the left-hand bend . . . He could see lights in the distance. The lights appeared and disappeared as a hedge or a tree trunk cut them from his view, and appeared again. Two sets of lights, not one car but two, both of them silver, quite close together. One was the Honda but he couldn't tell which, not from here, not in the dark, but he could read the number or the last three digits. As soon as he had given a great push to the lump on the parapet and felt it drop, he knew he had aimed at the wrong car. The crash was huge, like a bomb. The first car, the one he had hit, ploughed into a tree trunk, its bonnet burst open, its windscreen gone, half its roof caved in. It seemed to have split and exploded. The car behind, undamaged until this point, crashed into its rear and its boot lid sprang open. That was the silver Honda which had been his quarry. As its driver got out of it, screaming, her hands up in the air, he knew he had failed. He waited no longer but picked up the backpack and moved, looking back once to see the leading car burst into flames. In the brilliant light which illuminated everything he saw for the first time the woman he had tried to kill. Excerpted from End in Tears by Ruth Rendell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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