Ruth Rendell

When the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins. The grisly discovery leads a group of friends, who played together as children, to question their pasts.

A chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, brings Wexford out of retirement. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an advisor on a difficult case.

When Carl sells a box of slimming pills to his close friend Stacey, inadvertently causing her death, he sets in train a sequence of catastrophic events which begin with subterfuge, extend to lies and culminate in murder. In Rendell's dark and atmospheric tale of psychological suspense, we encounter mistaken identity, kidnap, blackmail and a cast of characters who are so real that we come to know them better than we know ourselves.

The raven: not a particularly predatory bird, but far from soft and submissive, adopted as the symbol of a militant feminist group ... Detective Chief Inspector Wexford thought he was merely doing a neighbourly good deed when he agreed to talk to Joy Williams about her missing husband. He certainly didn't expect to be investigating a most unusual homicide. Rodney Williams was neither handsome nor wealthy - but he had an unerring eye for a pretty girl...