Harm Done (Chief Inspector Wexford Series #18)

by Ruth Rendell

Overview

The search for the body commenced. Then the victim walked into town.

Behind the picture-postcard façade of Kingsmarkham lies a community rife with violence, betrayal, and a taste for vengeance. When sixteen-year-old Lizzie Cromwell reappears no one knows where she has been, including Lizzie herself. Inspector Wexford thinks she was with a boyfriend. But the disappearance of a three-year-old girl casts a more ominous light on events. And when the public's outrage turns toward a recently released pederast and another suspect turns up stabbed to death, Wexford must try to unravel the mystery before any more bodies appear, and before a mob of local vigilantes metes out a rough justice to their least favorite suspect. In Harm Done, the violence is near at hand, and evil lies just a few doors down the block.        


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307426185
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/08/2019
Series:	Chief Inspector Wexford Series , #18
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	175,544
File size:	594 KB

About the Author

Ruth Rendell is the author of Road Rage, The Keys to the Street, Bloodlines, Simisola, and The Crocodile Bird. She is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. She is also the recipient of three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America and four Gold Daggers from Great Britain’s Crime Writers Association. In 1997, she was named a life peer in the House of Lords. Ruth Rendell also writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine, of which A Dark Adapted Eye is the most famous. She lives in England.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Date of Birth:

February 17, 1930

Date of Death:

May 4, 2015

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

Loughton County High School for Girls, Essex

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead the police and her family and neighbors had already begun the search for her body. They worked on the open countryside between Kingsmarkham and Myringham, combing the hillsides and beating through the woods. It was April but cold and wet, and a sharp northeast wind was blowing. Their task was not a pleasant one; no one laughed or joked and there was little talking.
Lizzie's stepfather was among the searchers, but her mother was too upset to leave the house. The evening before, the two of them had appeared on television to appeal for Lizzie to come home, for her abductor or attacker, whatever he might be, to release her. Her mother said she was only sixteen, which was already known, and that she had learning difficulties, which was not. Her stepfather was a lot younger than her mother, perhaps ten years, and looked very young. He had long hair and a beard and wore several earrings, all in the same ear. After the television appearance several people phoned Kingsmarkham Police Station and opined that Colin Crowne had murdered his stepdaughter. One said Colin had buried her on the building site down York Street, a quarter of a mile down the road from where the Crownes and Lizzie lived on the Muriel Campden Estate. Another told Detective Sergeant Vine that she had heard Colin Crowne threaten to kill Lizzie "because she was as thick as two planks."

"Those folks as go on telly to talk about their missing kids," said a caller who refused to give her name, "they're always the guilty ones. It's always the dad. I've seen it time and time again. If you don't know that, you've no business being in the police."

Chief Inspector Wexford thought she was dead. Not because of what the anonymous caller said, but because all the evidence pointed that way. Lizzie had no boyfriend, she was not at all precocious, she had a low IQ and was rather slow and timid. Three evenings before, she had gone with some friends on the bus to the cinema in Myringham, but at the end of the film the other two girls had left her to come home alone. They had asked her to come clubbing with them but Lizzie had said her mother would be worried--the friends thought Lizzie herself was worried at the idea--and they left her at the bus stop. It was just before eight-thirty and getting dark. She should have been home in Kingsmarkham by nine-fifteen, but she didn't come home at all. At midnight her mother had phoned the police.

If she had been, well, a different sort of girl, Wexford wouldn't have paid so much attention. If she had been more like her friends. He hesitated about the phrase he used even in his own mind, for he liked to keep to his personal brand of political correctness in his thoughts as well as his speech. Not to be absurd about it, not to use ridiculous expressions like intellectually challenged, but not to be insensitive either and call a girl such as Lizzie Cromwell mentally handicapped or retarded. Besides, she wasn't either of those things, she could read and write, more or less, she had a certain measure of independence and went about on her own. In daylight, at any rate. But she wasn't fit just the same to be left alone after dark on a lonely road. Come to that, what girl was?

So he thought she was dead. Murdered by someone. What he had seen of Colin Crowne he hadn't much liked, but he had no reason to suspect him of killing his stepdaughter. True, some years before he married Debbie Cromwell, Crowne had been convicted of assault on a man outside a pub, and he had another conviction for taking and driving away--in other words, stealing--a car. But what did all that amount to? Not much. It was more likely that someone had stopped and offered Lizzie a lift.

"Would she accept a lift from a stranger?" Vine had asked Debbie Crowne.

"Sometimes it's hard to make her like understand things," Lizzie's mother had said. "She'll sort of say yes and no and smile--she smiles a lot, she's a happy kid--but you don't know if it's like sunk in. Do you, Col?"

"I've told her never talk to strangers," said Colin Crowne. "I've told her till I'm blue in the face, but what do I get? A smile and a nod and another smile, then she'll just say something else, something loony, like the sun's shining or what's for tea."

"Not loony, Col," said the mother, obviously hurt.

"You know what I mean."

So when she had been gone three nights and it was the morning of the third day, Colin Crowne and the neighbors on either side of the Crownes on the Muriel Campden Estate started searching for Lizzie. Wexford had already talked to her friends and the driver of the bus she should have been on but hadn't been on, and Inspector Burden and Sergeant Vine had talked to dozens of motorists who used that road daily around about that time. When the rain became torrential, which happened at about four in the afternoon, they called off the search for that day, but they were set to begin again at first light. Taking DC Lynn Fancourt with him, Wexford went over to Puck Road for another talk with Colin and Debbie Crowne.

When it was built in the sixties, on an open space that would now be called a "green field area," between the top of York Street and the western side of Glebe Road, the three streets and block of flats on a green in the midst of them, it had been called the York Estate. The then chairman of the housing committee, who had done A Midsummer Night's Dream for his school certificate and was proud of the knowledge thus gained, named the streets after characters in that comedy, Oberon, Titania, and Puck.


From the Hardcover edition.

What People are Saying About This

Scott Turow

Ruth Rendell is surely one of the greatest novelists presently at work in our language. She is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who enjoys either brilliant mystery—or distinguished literature.

Patricia Cornwell

Ruth Rendell is unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time.

John Mortimer

No one writes with more devastating accuracy about the world we live and commit sins in today....She is one of our most important novelists.

Francis Fyfield

Ruth Rendell has written some of the best novels of twentieth-century crime fiction.
— (Frances Fyfield, author of Blind Date and Without Consent)

Editorial Reviews

Inspector Wexford Returns

Ruth Rendell's long, varied career has been a constant source of astonishment and pleasure. Since the appearance of her first novel, From Doon with Death in 1964, she has published nearly 50 books, most of which fall into three general categories. There are the Inspector Wexford novels, a long-running series of police procedurals set in the fictional Sussex village of Kingsmarkham. There are the psychological thrillers, such as The Bridesmaid, The Crocodile Bird, and Live Flesh, many of which contain eerily precise renderings of violent, abnormal mental states. Finally, there are the Barbara Vine novels, subtle, sometimes leisurely narratives that straddle the imaginary boundary between mainstream and genre fiction.

Rendell's latest, Harm Done, is a Wexford novel, the first since 1997's Road Rage and one of the longest, most ambitious entries in the series. In this one, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford is confronted with an assortment of investigations that intersect -- or appear to intersect -- at a number of points. For reasons that will eventually become obvious, Wexford later comes to think of this intertwining series of occurrences as the Children's Crusade.

Harm Done opens with the disappearance of a not-quite-retarded 16-year-old named Lizzie Cromwell. Three days after her abduction, Lizzie returns home, obviously unharmed but unable -- or unwilling -- to explain her absence. (She is also, as Wexford quickly learns, pregnant, a circumstance that may or may not be related to her disappearance.) One week later, a college student named Rachel Holmes -- older, brighter, more aggressive than Lizzie -- vanishes in a similar fashion. She, too, returns within three days and is equally unwilling to cooperate with local investigators. Shortly afterward, the three-year-old daughter of a wealthy airline executive also disappears, stolen from her bedroom in the small hours of the morning. This particular victim -- Sanchia Devenish -- does not immediately return, and the mystery of her whereabouts provides this complex novel with its dramatic -- and thematic -- center.

Wexford's life -- and village life in general -- is further complicated by two unrelated elements. One concerns the arrival of a once-notorious pedophile -- Thomas Orbe -- who has just been discharged from prison and has taken up residence in Kingsmarkham. When the news of Sanchia Devenish's abduction is made public, Orbe becomes the focal point of the community's outrage, outrage that has violent, ultimately tragic consequences. The second element concerns the presence in Kingsmarkham of a controversial haven for battered women called The Hide. Wexford's daughter Sylvia, a social worker with marital problems of her own, works as a volunteer at The Hide. Through her, Rendell provides us with a window on the grim realities of women victimized by violent, endlessly self-justifying husbands.

In the end, Sylvia's familiarity with the symptoms of marital abuse provides Wexford with the key to Sanchia's disappearance. Studying a group portrait of the Devenish family -- handsome, self-confident husband; pale, self-deprecating wife; blank, expressionless children -- Sylvia understands immediately that Stephen Devenish -- husband, father, extraordinarily successful businessman -- is a wife-beater. Once the nature of life in the Devenish family is made clear to Wexford, he finds his way to the heart of the novel's central mystery and sets in motion a series of events that ends, inevitably, in murder.

Rendell is at the top of her game in this one, skillfully manipulating a large cast of characters and a multitude of subplots to produce a wide-ranging, deeply felt meditation on the infinitely vulnerable institution of the family. The numerous families that populate this novel are threatened, and sometimes destroyed, by the forces of poverty, insanity, greed, ignorance, and, most centrally, violence. Rendell's portraits of battered and beleaguered women, her anger over the lingering belief that domestic violence is somehow "acceptable," and her gradual revelation of the casual brutality of life in the Devenish household combine to give this gritty, aptly titled novel an immediacy, a sense of moral and emotional urgency, that lift it well above the level of more traditional detective stories and onto the level of literature.

During the course of her career, Rendell has won virtually every award that the mystery community can bestow: multiple Edgar awards, multiple Gold Daggers, Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers Association of England. Reading her latest, it's not hard to understand why. Harm Done is a well-constructed, deeply affecting novel. It offers further evidence -- as if further evidence were needed -- that its author is one of the preeminent figures of 20th-century crime fiction.

—Bill Sheehan

bn.com

A Letter from Ruth Rendell

After publishing her first Inspector Wexford mystery in 1964, one might think Ruth Rendell had had enough. Not true. The amazing Rendell, clearly one of the genre's preeminent 20th-century talents, returns with Harm Done, her latest Wexford page-turner. In an essay written exclusively for barnesandnoble.com, Ruth Rendell discusses her inspiration for Harm Done: an attempt to bring the very real and tragic issues of pedophilia and domestic abuse to the forefront of popular fiction.

The Political Wexfords by Ruth Rendell

Dear Reader,

For want of a better name, I call them the "political Wexfords." They are the detective stories I write featuring Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden with this difference: As well as being mysteries with, I hope, an exciting plot and a problem in detection to solve, they present aspects of the contemporary social scene.

Simisola was the first of them. That was about racism in the English countryside, that and domestic slavery, the situation in which young women are brought to Britain as family servants, inadequately paid, if paid at all, and virtually imprisoned. The second political Wexford was Road Rage, not an investigation of that phenomenon whereby people involved in road incidents or accidents abuse each other, but concerning the environment. It exposed the rage people feel when a new road is built through their countryside, often contrary to their wishes and needs.

Harm Done, the third of these, is both darker and lighter than its predecessors. There is some light relief and humor to offset the very disturbing problems of pedophilia and domestic violence with which the narrative is concerned, but the major part of the book is devoted to exposing what really goes on when a brutal man -- in this case a wealthy, middle-class man -- habitually beats up and tortures his wife.

As a member of the Board of Management of Refuges for Abused Women, I have for some time now been involved in movements to counter domestic violence. Talking to some of the women who have suffered at the hands of husbands and partners, and hearing their shocking and often tragic stories, led me to decide I must write about all this. In the context of a detective novel and the exciting narrative this implies, I wanted to let readers know what savagery in the home really is, why women in this situation remain in it, how children, too, suffer, perhaps irrevocably, and how, strangely, those to whom being such a victim or perpetrator is unthinkable, shy away from the problem.

Harm Done is different from anything I have previously written in that, although the names, the setting, and the family pattern are my own invention, everything that happens to the victim has happened to some woman somewhere. Every word uttered has been spoken by some abused woman or some brutal man caught up in this dreadful situation. What happens in HARM DONE really happens, across all classes and ethnic groups, to the poor and the rich, the young -- and because bad habits die very hard -- to the old as well. And the biggest fallacy of all is that this only happens when the man has been drinking.

I wanted to write about it and I have. While my readers enjoy this mystery and reacquainting themselves with Wexford and his family, I hope it will also open their eyes and help them to understand.

--Ruth Rendell, November 4, 1999

barnesandnoble.com

Fans of Ruth Rendell's work can't help wondering how she does it. How does she turn out so many wonderful novels, sometimes two or three a year, year after year? The woman is clearly some kind of genius who deserves all the many honors that have come, and continue to come, her way.
— Boston Globe

Diane White

Rendell’s clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.

New Yorker

Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.

Los Angeles Times

Rendell just seems to get sharper and sharper.

Ottawa Citizen

No one plays head games quite as well as Rendell.

Gazette (Montreal)

British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for whom no superlative is sufficient.

Chronicle-Herald

Chief Inspector Wexford is having a busy month. First two young women are taken from a bus stop; then a pedophile is released from jail, triggering violence from members of the community. During the course of these events a colleague is killed. Then a child is stolen from her crib in the middle of the night, and later her father is found murdered. On top of this Wexford must deal with the disintegration of his daughter's marriage and her new job in a shelter for victims of domestic violence, a job that lands her right in the middle of several of the cases he is working on. How does the inspector deal with these cases as well as the crises that are arising from his own family? Unlike most crime mysteries, this seems to be more of a slice of life focusing on a variety of tales and their aftermaths. Though the novel, read by Christopher Ravenscroft, starts out promisingly, it gets bogged down, and the stories come to boring, contrived endings. Since Rendell is a popular writer, libraries will want to have this title to satisfy demand. Otherwise, not a necessary purchase.--Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Harm Done is not so much a murder mystery (although a murder does eventually take place) as a novel evoking one kind of abuse after another, detailing all the symptoms of a vast malaise...[A]ll this is recounted in Ruth Rendell's usual manner which is unimpassioned, shrewd, and faintly ironic...a lively speculative tone is maintained throughout.
—From The Times Literary Supplement.

Patricia Craig

"Ruth Rendell is unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time."
—Patricia Cornwell

"Rendell's clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional."
—The New Yorker

"No one plays head games quite as well as Rendell."
—The Gazette (Montreal)

"Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime."
—Los Angeles Times

"No one writes with more devastating accuracy about the world we live and commit sins in today. . . . She is one of our most important novelists."
—John Mortimer

"Rendell just seems to get sharper and sharper."
—The Ottawa Citizen

"British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for whom no superlative is sufficient."
—Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

"Ruth Rendell has written some of the best novels of twentieth-century crime fiction."
—Frances Fyfield, author of Blind Date and Without Consent

"Ruth Rendell is surely one of the greatest novelists presently at work in our language. She is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who enjoys either brilliant mystery—or distinguished literature."
—Scott Turow

From the Publisher