Ruth Rendell died today and the world feels emptier already. I probably spent 2.5 solid years reading all her books. And i keep thinking it she’d had more time (she was 85), there would have been more. She was writing right up to the end. Some writers run out of steam. Not Ruth.

Ruth, deservedly the most decorated of British crime writer, transformed what had become a staid and formulaic genre into something that offered scope for a different kind of crime novel. She turned it into a prism for examining the world with a critical eye.

Two lines from one of my favorite of her novels, A Judgement in Stone: the opening with line: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write”