Forgotten Book: NO MORE DYING THEN, Ruth Rendell

For many of my contributions 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.

I can see from my records that in the first three months of the year I was on a huge Ruth Rendell "kick".
I read

• ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN (1971)
• LIVE FLESH (1986)
• A SLEEPING LIFE (1978) - Wexford
• THE KILLING DOLL  (1984)
• AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS (1985) - Wexford
• COLLECTED SHORT STORIES
• THE VEILED ONE (1988) - Wexford
• THE BRIDESMAID (1989)
• HEARTSTONES (1987)
• A JUDGEMENT IN STONE (1977)
• NO MORE DYING THEN (1971) - Wexford
• GOING WRONG (1990)
• THE COPPER PEACOCK (1980) - short stories

all by the end of  March and then more later in the year.
I am surprised that so many of the titles I read were stand-alones.

NO MORE DYING THEN is #6 in the Inspector Wexford series.

Synopsis (from Amazon)

What kind of a person would kidnap two children?

That is the question that haunts Wexford when a five-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl disappear from the village of Kingsmarkham. When a child's body turns up at an abandoned country home one search turns into a murder investigation and the other turns into a race against time.  Filled with pathos and terror, passion, bitterness, and loss, No More Dying Then is Rendell at her most chillingly astute.

Read the first few pages.