Portobello

With this captivating novel, the reigning queen of crime fiction establishes that an unsolved murder is not a necessary ingredient of a suspense-filled mystery … Her deft sculpturing of characters’ idiosyncratic obsessions and foibles betrays a shrewdness of perception of which even the absent Wexford would be proud. * Time Out *
A roundabout of characters is set whirling along in an irresistibly readable, tragi-comic carnival. Dr Johnson’s dictum could be amended here: the reader who is tired of Ruth Rendell’s novel of London is tired of life * Independent *
Impossible to put down … Rendell, at her most sardonic here, may view all her characters as creatures who live under stones but it is her sense of place that counts. She makes you smell the excitement and desperation. Portobello is as brilliant as anything she has ever written * Evening Standard *
Ruth Rendell is marvellous at psychological tension … Rendell is too clever and too accomplished to serve up the expected. She supplies a satisfying, rather low-key ending in which she knits all the threads together with a casual flourish that shows veteran expertise * Sunday Times *
A thriller steeped in psychological intrigue … Rendell’s prose style is as succinct and accessible as ever * Daily Mirror *
Portobello is Ruth Rendell in a quiet mood with an absorbing story about strange inhabitants of Portobello Road market in London and it’s Notting Hill environs… the various misfits, with their eccentricities, interact as only Rendell can manipulate. She portrays the Portobello area, a melting-pot home to the poor and the posh, with harsh, realistic affection bordering on the elegiac. * The Times *
Portobello is a rich and quirky picture of one of the most idiosyncratic areas of London … Rendell’s evocation of Notting Hill and Portobello Road market is one of her most vivid realisations … Admirers of Rendell will quickly realise that Portobello demonstrates a markedly different approach to her previous books. The eccentricities and grotesqueries of the characters here are drawn very large; too large, in fact, to be confined within the parameters of the standard crime novel. However, if Portobello breaks out of that particular category, it is none the worse for it * Daily Express *
In the bustling souk of Portobello Road, three characters with very different lives are brought together by Fate, greed and curiosity … each is brought to life with expert strokes, as is this chaotic, restless, deeply divided part of London. Their lives collide dangerously, almost fatally, in an intense, compelling tale, and the resolution is oddly unsettling. * Psychologies *
Rendell’s take on Notting Hill restores some of the rawness taken away by gentrification and the saccharine stammer of the film of the same name, tapping into its former reputation for slum landlords, racial tension and nasty cops * Guardian *
Ruth Rendell excels in the creation of dread by bringing together disturbed psyches with the contingent and coincidental * TLS *

Ruth Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, and will be remembered as a legend in her own lifetime. Her groundbreaking debut novel, From Doon With Death, was first published in 1964 and introduced the reader to her enduring and popular detective, Inspector Reginald Wexford, who went on to feature in twenty-four of her subsequent novels.

With worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, Rendell was a regular Sunday Times bestseller. Her sixty bestselling novels include police procedurals, some of which have been successfully adapted for TV, stand-alone psychological mysteries, and a third strand of crime novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Very much abreast of her times, the Wexford books in particular often engaged with social or political issues close to her heart.

Rendell won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View, a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986, and the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

Ruth Rendell died in May 2015. Her final novel, Dark Corners, was published in October 2015.

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