No man's nightingale

Ruth Rendell, 1930-

Large print - 2014

"A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. The gossipy cleaning woman who discovers her body, Maxine, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. When detective inspector Mike Burden calls him, Wexford, intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. A single-mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was a woman working in a male-dominated profession. Moreover, she was of mixed race and working to modernize the church. Could racism or sexism played a factor in her murder? As he searches the vicar's house with Burden, Wexford sees a book on her bedside table. Inside the book is a letter serving... as a bookmark. Without thinking much, Wexford puts it into his pocket. Wexford soon realizes he has made a grave error - the former policeman has taken away a piece of valuable evidence without telling anybody. What he finds inside begins to illuminate the murky past of Hussein. Is there more to her than meets the eye? No Man's Nightingale is the captivating twenty-fourth installment in Rendell's masterful Wexford series, which has been delighting readers for almost half a century"--

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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
Thorndike, Maine : Center Point Large Print 2014.
Language
English
Main Author
Ruth Rendell, 1930- (-)
Edition
Center Point Large Print edition
Physical Description
368 pages (large print) ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781611739534
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

NO MAN'S NIGHTINGALE (Scribner, $26) is Ruth Rendell's 24th Inspector Wexford procedural mystery in almost 50 years, so we're naturally curious about how that venerable detective may have mellowed in retirement. Well, his mind is still sharp enough to solve a murder case bungled by Mike Burden, his old deputy and now detective superintendent of the Kingsmarkham constabulary. Always a tolerant man, Wexford is ever more alarmed by the racism and bigotry that have taken root in his little patch of England and were a factor in the murder of the Rev. Sarah Hussain, abiracial single mother raising an out-of-wedlock child. And, if anything, he's grown more caustic about barbaric insults to the mother tongue, like the Alternative Service Book that replaced the Book of Common Prayer in Anglican churches. But while Wexford seems content to let a younger generation make its own mistakes, he does feel diminished by the loss of his professional status. He's also become quite testy about the limits imposed by age and, more annoyingly, by restrictive social attitudes about age. "He was realizing how insignificant he had become in the great scheme of law and order... of having nothing to do in a society where doing things was all-important." More philosophical? I'd say so. Mellow? Not on your life. MICKEY HALLER IS the kind of lawyer who works out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car and gets paid for his services in gold bricks. In Michael Connelly's latest legal thriller, THE GODS OF GUILT (Little, Brown, $28), a "digital pimp" arrested for murdering one of the prostitutes whose professional websites he manages joins Mickey's sterling client list of thieves, rapists, embezzlers and killers. But for once this ethics-challenged criminal defense lawyer needn't resort to any shady shenanigans because Andre La Cosse didn't kill Giselle Dallinger - or Gloria Dayton, as she was known to Mickey seven years earlier, when he helped her get out of the game and staked her to what he thought would be a new life in Hawaii. Disheartened to learn that he hadn't "changed the direction of a life" after all, Mickey feels compelled to perform another good deed to relieve his conscience. "There is no more noble a cause on this planet than to stand for the wrongly accused," he's advised by the old lawyer he considers his life coach. So saving La Cosse and finding Gloria's real killer might keep him from being haunted by the "12 apostles, the gods of guilt" who sit in life's jury box, passing judgment on him for a colorful but hardly glorious career of snatching lowlifes from the jaws of the law. An honorable performance in the courtroom might even redeem Mickey in the eyes of his 16-year-old daughter, who can't forgive her father for springing a guilty client who turned around and killed two people she knew in a drunken-driving accident. At this point, you want to buckle up for the roller coaster of a trial this has all been leading up to. Connelly stays cool as he crosscuts between tense courtroom scenes before the "gods of guilt" and brutal confrontations outside the courthouse with the hired killers from a Sinaloan drug cartel, a rogue government agent and some plain old crooked Los Angeles detectives. Mickey's got a lot riding on this trial - but, win or lose, let's hope his attempts at character reformation don't last too long. NOTHING JACK TAYLOR does should surprise readers of Ken Bruen's poetically violent novels - except how long this bad boy manages to lay off the booze, cigarettes and brawling in PURGATORY (Mysterious Press/ Grove/Atlantic, $24). But rest easy: Our roaring lad eventually rises to confront the taunts of a serial killer who wants him to join his crusade. The turning point for Jack is a recruitment dinner with a mysterious billionaire intent on acquiring the remaining assets of the faltering local economy. "You're a sort of Irish Zelig," he tells Jack, "witness to the history of Galway." But the things Jack witnesses these days - feral teenage gangs, high-school girls wasted on dope, thieves who steal the gold chalices from churches - would cause a saint to go blind. And Jack, whose heroism is fueled by "plain old-fashioned rage, bile and bitterness," is no saint. Never was, never will be. Amen. THE DOMESTIC AFFAIRS of fictional sleuths are rarely as fascinating as their authors think they are. But you have to admit that Clare Fergusson, the Episcopal priest in Julia Spencer-Fleming's mysteries, set in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, leads an eventful life. THROUGH THE EVIL DAYS (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $25.99) finds Clare very recently married, obviously pregnant and back at her pastoral duties in Millers Kill after serving in Iraq. But because of the awkward timing of that pregnancy she's been told to resign her post or be called up on charges of "sexual misconduct and conduct unbecoming to a priest." Meanwhile, Russ Van Alstyne, Clare's new husband and the local chief of police, has just learned the town council is proposing to shut down his department and outsource the work to the state police. Given all this Sturm und Drang, it's amazing Spencer-Fleming manages to carry off a layered plot that opens with an arson, a double homicide and a kidnapping and expands into a broader picture of the drug use, domestic violence and desolation squeezing the life out of this small town.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 1, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

Firmly established in his retirement, former Chief Inspector Wexford is so thoroughly enjoying reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that passages from it stud this narrative. Still, he leaps at the invitation, from his successor and former partner, Michael Burden, to visit the vicarage where the Reverend Sarah Hussein was strangled to death. Treading carefully in joining the murder investigation, the intuitive Wexford is most interested in the past of the late vicar, whose daughter, Clarissa, was born years after her mother was widowed. That Clarissa was to be told the circumstances of her birth when she turned 18, just a few months hence, adds to the intrigue. Wexford's talkative cleaning woman, Maxine Sams, and her family also figure in the case, which is pursued rather languidly to its conclusion. In her twenty-fourth Wexford mystery, Rendell continues to raise social issues sexism, racism, the modernization of the Church of England but the series, like its protagonist, may be slowing down a bit with age. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Although this isn't among the best in the long-running and much-adored Inspector Wexford series, it remains must reading for Rendell's many well-earned fans.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Rendell's absorbing 24th Inspector Wexford novel (after 2011's The Vault), the Kingsmarkham, England, sleuth tries to find out who strangled the Rev. Sarah Hussain in the vicarage of St. Peter's Church, and why. The fact that Hussain was biracial and a single mother had galvanized bigots near and far, who resented her very existence as well as her modernizing the liturgy. When Wexford's grandson, Robin, begins dating Sarah's daughter, Clarissa, Robin gets entangled in identifying Clarissa's sperm-donor father-further upping the ante for Wexford. Is a white power group responsible for killing Sarah, or had a personal relationship curdled into fury? Suspects abound: the shiftless depressive Jeremy Legg; the Anglican traditionalist Dennis Cuthbert; and Gerald Watson, a stuffy old flame of the murdered woman. Wexford's strengths as a man and as a detective are his calmness and resilience. A serene atheist, he looks to the conscience of humanity and Britain's flawed but well-intended laws to glean whatever justice can exist today. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Perhaps he retired officially, but Wexford is eager to jump in when asked to by his former deputy. What to make of a strangled vicar in Wexford's 25th case (after The Vault)? Noteworthy: this series is on the cusp of its 50th anniversary! (Starts with From Doon with Death) [See Prepub Alert, 5/13/13.] (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford (The Vault, 2011, etc.) may have retired from the Kingsmarkham Police, but murder keeps finding him, this time by invading his own neighborhood. Having a new vicar who's an unmarried Irish-Indian mother has scandalized old-guard warden Dennis Cuthbert and quite a few members of the St. Peter's congregation. But would any of them really have hated Sarah Hussain enough to have strangled her? Detective Superintendent Mike Burden invites Wexford, his old boss, to accompany him on his rounds of questioning. One promising line of inquiry ends with the suicide of a suspect who confesses to unhappiness and bad behavior but not to murder; another, to a split between two old colleagues when Burden arrests gardener Duncan Crisp, who Wexford believes is innocent. It's hard carrying on an investigation with no warrant card after the case has been officially closed, but Wexford has a secret weapon: Maxine Sams, the superlatively gossipy cleaner he shares with several neighbors. Maxine, among the most sharply realized of all Rendell's characters, is essentially a comic figure, but there's nothing comic about her son Jason, a supermarket manager whose dodgy relationship with his landlord, Jeremy Legg, goes seriously awry with the unexpected return from Europe of Jeremy's ex-wife, Diane Stow, whose council flat Jeremy has been illegally renting out. Still more subplots (who fathered Sarah's daughter Clarissa?) and hints of old sins (how did her husband, Leo, really die?) filtered through unreliable memories and personalities give the neighborhood a sense of thick and vibrant life, though they virtually guarantee that the revelation of Sarah's killer will be only one more in a series of revelations that come not with a triumphant flourish but a dying fall. The insistence on plumbing the past makes this sedate, quirky whodunit read like an uneven collaboration between Rendell and her doomy alter ego Barbara Vine (The Child's Child, 2012, etc.).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

No Man's Nightingale 1 MAXINE WAS PROUD of having three jobs. These days more and more people had none. She had no sympathy for them but congratulated herself on her own initiative. Two mornings a week she cleaned for Mrs. Wexford, two mornings for Mrs. Crocker, afternoons for two other Kingsmarkham women, did gardening and cleaned cars for Mr. Wexford and Dr. Crocker and babysat every evening where she was wanted for those young enough to need a baby-sitter. Cleaning she did for the women and gardening and car-washing for the men because she had never believed in any of that feminism or equality stuff. It was a well-known fact that men didn't notice whether a house was clean or not, and normal women weren't interested in cars or lawns. Maxine charged maximum rates for baby-sitting except for her son and his partner, who got her services for free. As for the others, those who had kids must expect to pay for them. She'd had four and she knew. She was a good worker, reliable, punctual, and reasonably honest, and the only condition she made was payment in cash. Wexford, who after all had until recently been a policeman, demurred at that but eventually gave in the way the tax inspector up the road did. After all, at least a dozen other households would have paid almost anything to secure Maxine's services. She had one drawback. She talked. She talked not just while she was having a break for a cup of tea or while she was getting out or putting away the tools, but all the time she was working and to whoever happened to be in the room or upstairs in the kitchen. The work got done and efficiently while the words poured out on a steady monotone. That day she began on a story of how her son Jason, now manager of the Kingsmarkham Questo supermarket, had dealt with a man complaining about one of Jason's checkout girls. The woman had apparently called him "elderly." But Jason had handled it brilliantly, pacifying the man and sending him home in a supervisor's car. "Now my Jason used to be a right tearaway," Maxine went on, and not for the first time. "Not in one of them gangs, I'm not saying that, and he never got no ASBOs, but a bit of shoplifting, it was like it came natural to him, and out all night and underage drinking--well, binge-drinking like they call it. As for the smack and what do they call them, description drugs--mind Mr. Wexford can't hear me, hope he's out of hearshot--all that he went in for, and now, since him and Nicky had a kid, he's a changed character. The perfect dad, I still can't believe it." She applied impregnated wadding to the silver with renewed vigour, then a duster, then the wadding once more. "She's over a year old now, his Isabella is, but when she was a neo-nettle, it was never Nicky got up to her in the night, she never had to. No, it was my Jason had her out of her cot before the first peep was out of her. Walked her up and down, cooing at her like I've never heard a bloke go on so. Mind you, that Nicky never showed no gratitude. I call it unnatural a mum with a new baby sleeping the night through, and I've told her so." Even Maxine sometimes had to pause to draw breath. Dora Wexford seized her opportunity, said she had to go out and Maxine's money was in an envelope on the hall table. The resumed monologue pursued her as she ran out to the conservatory to tell her husband she'd be back in an hour or so. Wexford was sitting in a cane armchair in autumn sunshine doing what many a man or woman plans to do on retirement but few put into practice, reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had embarked on it expecting to find it heavy going, but instead becoming fast enraptured and enjoying every word. Reaching the end of the first volume, he was happy to anticipate five more and told Dora she'd picked her moment to desert him. "It's your turn," she whispered. "I didn't know we had a schedule." "You know now. Here starts your tour of duty." As Dora left, Maxine swooped, pushing the vacuum cleaner and continuing to hold on to it while she peered over his shoulder. "Got a guide to Rome there, I see. Going there on your holidays, are you? Me and my sister took in Rome on our Ten Italian Cities tour. Oh, it was lovely but hot, you wouldn't believe. I said to my Jason, you and Nicky want to go there on your honeymoon when you get around to tying the knot there's no untying, only these days there is of course, no point in getting married if you ask me. I never did and I'm not ashamed of it." She started up the vacuum cleaner but continued to talk. "It's Nicky as wants it, one of them big white weddings like they all want these days, costs thousands, but she's a big spender, good job my Jason's in work like so many's not." The voice became a buzz under the vacuum's roar. She raised it. "I don't reckon my Jason'd go away on a honeymoon or anything else come to that without Isabella. He can't bear that kid out of his sight for his eight hours' work let alone a week. Talk about worshipping the ground she treads on, only she don't tread yet, crawls more like." A pause to change the tool on the end of the vacuum-cleaner hose. "You'll know about that poor lady vicar getting herself killed and me finding the body. It was all over the papers and on the telly. I reckon you take an interest though you're not doing the work no more. I had a cleaning job there with her up till a couple of weeks back, but there was things we never saw eye to eye on, not to mention her not wanting to pay cash, wanted to do it on line if you please and I couldn't be doing with that. She always left the back door open and I popped in to collect the money she owed me and it gave me a terrible turn. No blood, of course, not with strangling, but still a shock. Don't bear thinking of, does it? Still, I reckon you had to think of things like that, it being your job. You must be relieved getting all that over with . . ." Standing up, clutching his book, "I'm going to have a bath!" Wexford shouted above the vacuum's roar. Maxine was startled from her monologue. "It's ten thirty." "A very good time to have a bath," said Wexford, making for the stairs, reading as he went the last lines of volume one, describing another murder, that of Julius Caesar: . . . during the greatest part of a year, the orb of the sun appeared pale and without splendour. This season of obscurity, which cannot surely be compared with the preternatural obscurity of the Passion, had already been celebrated by most of the poets and historians of that memorable age. . . . His mobile was ringing. Detective Superintendent Burden, known to the phone-contacts list as Mike. "I'm off to have a look at St. Peter's Vicarage, taking Lynn with me and I thought you might like to come too." Wexford had already had a shower that day. A bath at 10:30 a.m. wasn't needful, only seized upon as a refuge from Maxine. "I'd love to." He tried to keep the enthusiasm out of his voice, tried and failed. Sounding surprised, Burden said, "Don't get excited. It's no big deal." "It is for me." He closed the bathroom door. Probably, Maxine wouldn't open it but would perhaps conclude that he was having an exceptionally long bath. The vacuum cleaner still roaring, he escaped out the front door, closing it after him by an almost silent turning of the key in the lock. Taking an interested member of the public--that, after all, was what he was--on a call or calls that were part of a criminal investigation was something Wexford had seldom done while he was himself an investigating officer. And his accompanying Superintendent Ede of the Met on the vault enquiries was a different matter as he, though unpaid, had had a kind of job as Ede's aide. This visit, this opportune escape from Maxine, was undergone, he knew, because, once senior and junior officers, over the years they had become friends. Burden knew, none better, how much Wexford would wish to be involved in solving the mystery of who had killed the Reverend Sarah Hussain. ALL WEXFORD KNEW of the death, apart from what Maxine had mentioned that morning, was what he had read in yesterday's Guardian and seen on the day-before-yesterday's regional television news. And seen of course when passing the vicarage. He could have seen more online, but he had cringed from its colourful headlines. Sarah Hussain was far from being the only woman ordained priest of the Church of England, but perhaps she was the only one to have been born in the United Kingdom of a white Irishwoman and an Indian immigrant. All this had been in the newspaper along with some limited biographical details, including information about her conversion to Christianity. There had been a photograph too of a gaunt woman with an aquiline nose in an academic cap and gown, olive-skinned but with large, deep-set, black eyes and what hair that showed a glossy jet-black. She had been forty-eight when she died and a single mother. Her origins, her looks--striking but not handsome--her age, her single parenthood, and, above all, that conversion made him think that her life could not have been easy. He would have liked to know more, and no doubt, he soon would. At the moment he wasn't even sure of where the murder had taken place, only that it was inside the vicarage. It wasn't a house he had ever been in, though Dora had. He was due to meet Mike and DC Lynn Fancourt in St. Peter's Church porch, the one at the side where the vestry was. The vicarage was some distance away and he had no need to pass the church to reach it. Heading for the gate that led out of Queen Street, he passed a young man pushing a baby buggy, a not particularly unusual sight these days, but he recognized this one as Maxine's son Jason. As industrious as his mother if not as vociferous, he must be having a day off from his job as a supermarket manager. Curious to see the child whose father worshipped the ground she crawled on, Wexford looked under the buggy hood and saw a pretty, pink-cheeked blonde, her long-lashed eyes closed in sleep. Wexford hastily withdrew his head from Jason's glare. No doubt the man was wary of any male person eyeing his little girl. Quite right too, he thought, himself the parent of girls who were now middle-aged women. He was a little early and by design. In his position it was better for him to be waiting for them than they for him. But Burden was seldom late, and the two of them appeared almost immediately from the high street. All the years he had known him, Wexford had never ceased to marvel at Burden's sartorial elegance. Where did he learn to dress like that? As far as he knew, Mike went shopping no more than any other man of Wexford's acquaintance. And it couldn't be the influence of his wives, neither of whom, Jean, long dead, or Jenny, the present one, had had much interest in clothes, preferring in their own cases no more than attention to "neatness and fashion," as Jane Austen has it. But here was Burden today, his abundant but short hair now iron grey, his beige jacket (surely cashmere) over white shirt with beige-and-blue-figured tie, his beautifully creased trousers of denim, though discernibly--how? How could one tell?--not jeans. "Good to see you," Burden said, though he had seen him and eaten lunch with him three days before. Lynn, whom he hadn't seen for as much as a year, said in a respectful tone, "Good morning, sir." They walked along the path among gravestones and rosebushes towards Vicarage Lane. It was October and the leaves had only just begun to fall. Green, spiky conkers lay on the grass under the chestnut trees. "I don't know how much you know about this poor woman's murder, Reg," Burden said. "Only what I read in the paper and saw on TV." "You don't go to church, do you?" "I hesitate to say my wife does, though it's true, and you know it already. She knew Sarah Hussain but through church, not socially. Where was she killed?" "In the vicarage. In her living room. You tell him, Lynn. You were one of the two officers who were the first to see the body." Excerpted from No Man's Nightingale: An Inspector Wexford Novel by Ruth Rendell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.