Crime novels, once a name is established, should be a dream to sell as, on the whole, the writers are an unusually consistent bunch. A reader approaching that section in a shop can put out a confident hand to a familiar name…. The quality of the book may vary a little within the oeuvre of a writer but the kind of crime and the style of the novel rarely do. Ruth Rendell, however, is an exception to this rule because there is Ruth Rendell the detective writer and Ruth Rendell the psychological thriller writer, and there is no relationship between the two. I am pleased to announce that her new novel, Master of the Moor, is one of the latter.

The story opens with our central character, Stephen Whalby, finding the body of a strangled girl with a shorn head on his beloved Vangmoor. The moor is part of a group of bleak hills dominated by a warren of disused mines. Stephen, a good-looking man of 30, with a pretty, nervous wife and a melancholia-ridden father, still inhabits the emotional and physical world of his childhood. In that world he was King of Vangmoor. When the moor delivers up a second victim the police's attention fixes on him.

Although I was never in much doubt as to who the murderer was, the author is less interested in that aspect than in the effect of the killings on Stephen. There are two excellent, macabre twists in the tale, although the final confrontation, which the reader awaits with some expectation, is slightly skimped.