This omnibus contains two of Ruth Rendell's crime novels - 'The Lake of Darkness' and 'The Veiled One'.

Martin Urban is a quiet bachelor with a comfortable life, free of worry and distractions. When he unexpectedly comes into a small fortune, he decides to use his newfound wealth to help out those in need. Finn also leads a quiet life, and comes into a little money of his own. Normally, their paths would never have crossed. But Martin’s ideas about who should benefit from his charitable impulses yield some unexpected results, and soon the good intentions of the one become fatally entangled with the mercenary nature of the other. In the Lake of Darkness, Ruth Rendell takes the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished to a startling, haunting conclusion.

A bibliography of various mystery novels published between November 1976 and Fall 1992.

Wessex is retired -- or would be, if murder and danger would only leave him alone. The impossible has happened. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coachhouse in Hampstead belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila. For all the benefits of a more relaxed way of life, Wexford misses being the law. But a chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case. The bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal hole of an attractive house in St John's Wood. None carries identification. But the man's jacket pockets contain a string of pearls, a diamond and a sapphire necklace as well as other jewellery valued in the region of £40,000. Wexford is intrigued and excited by the challenge -- until this new investigative role brings him into serious physical danger.

Sir Manuel Camargue, yesterday one of the most celebrated musicians of his time, today floats face down in the lake near his sprawling English country house. The consensus is accidental death -- but Inspector Wexford knows the stench of murder most foul when he smells it. Particularly in the company of two suspects -- one, the victim's fiancee, who is too young to be true, the other his daughter who may be no kin and even less kind . . .

From Edgar Award-winning author Ruth Rendell, quiet, pretty Mary Jago could never have suspected that a series of unspeakable murders in the park contained threads that tangled around her simple, ordinary life. Set near London's Regent's Park, where the city's wealthiest, poorest, kindest, and most vicious citizens all cross paths, The Keys to the Street reminds us how interconnected life can be and how we're often surrounded by people that we fail to see. Mary generously donates her bone marrow to save the life of a young man she doesn't know, which will change her life forever. It leads to her bitter break up with Alistair and then to a relationship with the young man whose life she saved, Leo Nash. But when the homeless who seek refuge in the park start turning up murdered and impaled on the spiked railings that surround it, Mary is closer to danger than she ever could have imagined.