It is not so much that this story could not be told today but that it would be told differently and our sympathies might be expected to be somewhat different. I always say that a little flattery of the reader by an author is a surefire way to gain a readership. Read all Margaret Parsons, a fairly ordinary housewife who, with her water board official husband Ron, has recently moved to Kingsmarkham, is found murdered in a field.

It's been almost twenty years since I read it, and there has always been a niggling in the back of my mind to get back to her eventually. One of the hosts, Meredith, is a huge Louise Penny fan, as I was for the first eight novels of her series.A housewife is reported missing to Inspector Burden by her husband who comes home from work and she is not there.

Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, 133-137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, LONDON SW19 7JY.And you know the author who did it when it was Shocking was a product of her time, and common wisdom was different then, but still you just feel awkward for her. I presumed Rendell wrote in the vein of the classic/ golden age mystery novel, but ‘No Man’s Nightingale’ didn’t seem to fit into this vein.

Her characters--even the good-guy cops--are conflicted, flawed, stubborn, and utterly human, and her genre fiction is the best of its kind. The time and place and characters are generally well drawn, and the plot engaging (even though the outcome was obvious to me fairly early on). As Rendell explains in her Afterword, From Doon with Death was originally written as a one-off standalone. The psychological profile of the various characters emerges through the interviews and descriptions of present and past facts, but without anyone standing out above the others, at least until the last chapters, where the truth is revealed with a final twist. Rendell says she modeled Wexford after her father and I realized that maybe that is why this series appeals to me so much.

Next time you meet someone who seems without a single redeeming feature, muse upon what might be found out about them during a murder investigation! My feeling, however, was that I should wait to see how she resolved it before reaching a conclusion. I dislike detective series, I find it to be lazy writing more often than not and generally stay away from them.

I was about 2/3 through, thinking it was well written, interesting, but not yet sensing it was truly special. The home life is completely absent and the character is not given to quoting Shakespeare or other classics. As the woman's past is investigated the husband is either oblivious or may be among the numerous suspects. In the 2007 edition of the novel published by Ballantine Books there is a "Dossier" by the author in which she shares, "I realized that I had put an enormous amount of me-and to some extent my father-into him.Chilling, richly characterized, and ingeniously constructed, this is psychological suspense at its very finest. What I mean is that having read other Inspector Wexford books, I know that the author takes time to more fully develop Wexford's character as the series progresses.