A choice of crime novels | 21 January 2009

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants.

Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée. A rich man’s son, whom guilt has driven to the edge of madness, feels the siren call of death. An ineffectual young criminal is caught between his love for a girlfriend who has thrown him out and his dependence on a wicked old uncle of squalidly Dickensian eccentricity.