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A Sleeping Life

A Sleeping Life

The tenth wexford novel published by Hutchinson in


An unusual detective story, intelligent, well-written, with a surprising twist.

The Times Literary Supplement, 1978.

On a sultry August evening, the bloody body of a middle-aged woman is discovered beneath a hedge. Two things surprise Chief Inspector Wexford about the murder scene. One is that the only contents of the woman’s handbag are some keys and a wallet containing nothing but some money. And two, how even in death, her deathly grey eyes possess a scornful glare.

The woman turns out to be Rhoda Comfrey, but there’s no murder weapon, no apparent motive, and no one who cares that she died. Wexford’s only hunch is that the clues to her murder must lie in her solitary London life. But her existence there becomes frustratingly impossible to trace.

Notes

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. Means of Evil: Inside the Mind of Ruth Rendell by Diana Cooper-Clark, The Armchair Detective Vol. 14 Issue 1, Spring 1981 ↩︎

  2. Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎