Forgotten Book: ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN, Ruth Rendell

As I said last week, when I featured Ngaio Marsh's COLOUR SCHEME, for my contribution this year to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books I am going to focus on the books I read 20 years ago in 1992. By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction.

In January and February of 1992 I went through a Ruth Rendell phase.
My records show that I read 12 Ruth Rendell titles, in no particular order really, starting with ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN, a standalone published in 1971.

Of course, now, 20 years on, I don't remember much about the book at all.
According to Amazon the story outline is

Two things interest Stanley Manning: crossword puzzles, and the substantial sum his wife Vera stands to inherit when his mother-in-law dies.

Otherwise, life at 61 Lanchester Road is a living hell. For Mrs. Kinaway lives with them now—and she will stop at nothing to tear their marriage apart. One afternoon, Stanley sets aside his crossword puzzles and changes all their lives forever... 

In One Across, Two Down, master crime writer Ruth Rendell describes a man whose strained sanity and stained reputation transform him from a witless loser into a killer afraid of his own shadow.

According to my records though, this marks my "discovery" of Rendell, and I have been a fan of her writing ever since.