Ruth Rendell is really first-class, easy, natural and gemutlich in her writing, unhampered in her invention, a natural storyteller who uses crime as conveniently as the Victorian novelists used to, as a tensing part of stories about people. In [No More Dying Then], a provincial policeman has lost his wife and is suffering agonies of deprivation, and a child disappears, not the first to go in this town. Among many good characters, the creation of the destructively indolent Ivor Swan is especially worth praise.