Ruth Dudley Edwards: 36 books

This book suggests crime fiction is now the most relevant and valid form of writing which can deal with modern Ireland in terms of the post-'Troubles' landscape and post-Celtic Tiger economic boom. The book takes a chapter by chapter approach with each chapter and author discussing a different facet...

Impossible crime stories have been relished by puzzle-lovers ever since the invention of detective fiction. Fiendishly intricate cases were particularly well suited to the cerebral type of detective story that became so popular during the 'golden age of murder' between the two world wars. But the...

'The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.... Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.' – Sherlock Holmes Many of...

The magnificent Dungeon House and gardens overlook Cumbria's remote western coast with its mix of beaches, dunes, and fells, Roman ruins, and nuclear plant. Twenty years ago the wealthy Whiteleys called it home. But not a happy one. Malcolm Whiteley had begun to disintegrate under financial and emotional...

A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris – belonging to the city's chief of police. And a drowned man is fished from the sea off the Italian Riviera, leaving the carabinieri to wonder why his...

Warren Howe is surprised by a hooded visitor while working in a garden in Old Sawrey, a lovely village in England's Lake District. Soon it is Warren who is deadmurdered with his own scythe. The police identify several suspects, but lack the evidence to make an arrest. Years later, an anonymous tip...

Oxford historian and TV personality Daniel Kind and his new lover, Miranda, both want to escape to a new life. On impulse they buy Tarn Cottage in Brackdale, an idyllic valley in the Lake District that Daniel knew as a boy, a place so remote that the dead had to be carried out over the peaks on pack...

DCI Hannah Scarlett is determined to uncover the truth behind Emily Friend’s mysterious drowning in the Serpent Pool. But Hannah’s distracted by a new sergeant with a troublesome reputation, a new house, and new cause to doubt her partner--second hand bookseller Marc Amos. One of Marc’s best...

On Halloween, just before the First World War, a young woman's corpse was found with a makeshift shroud frozen to her battered face. Her ghost - the Faceless Woman - is said to walk through Ravenbank each Halloween. Just five years ago, Katya Moss was killed, her face also covered to hide her injuries....

Lady (Jack) Troutbeck is missing. So is celebrity curator Sir Henry Fortune and his partner, art dealer Jason Pringle. Then the London art world panics when no one can locate Anastasia Holliday, sensational abject artist; Jake Thorogood, the critic who catapulted her into stardom; or Dr. Hortense...

After ten years, Guy - a drifter with a taste for deception - has returned to Coniston in England's Lake District. Local journalist Tony di Venuto is campaigning to revive interest in the disappearance of Emma Bestwick, and Guy knows what happened to her. When Guy tips off the newspaperman...

Robert Amiss, lapsed civil servant, is approached by Lord Papworth, owner of the Wrangler, to step in as business manager for the august journal and do something about its steady drain on his lordship's finances. The magazine's editor, Willie Lambie Crump, and his staff are firmly mired in the 1950s,...

Twenty years ago, teenager Callum Hinds went missing in England's Lake District. His uncle, suspected of having done the boy harm, was interviewed by the police. When the uncle committed suicide near his cottage in the Hanging Wood, everyone assumed it was a sign of guilt. The boy's body was never...

The House of Lords will never be the same again. Disinclined to watch her language or moderate her manners, Jack Troutbeck, assisted by her old friend Robert Amiss, plots vigorously with others to scupper an anti-hunting bill of which she violently disapproves. But she hadnt reckoned with the campaign...