Put on by Cunning

When a celebrated flautist dies on a bitter winter night, the case seems simple enough — an old man, a frozen pond, an accident. But Inspector Wexford isn't satisfied, and the story that unravels from that quiet death touches on identity, inheritance, and the extraordinary lengths people will go to claim what they believe is theirs. Rendell builds her tension not through violence or spectacle but through the slow, unsettling accumulation of things that don't quite add up — a stranger's face, a story told too smoothly, a grief that doesn't feel real.

What sets this entry in the Wexford series apart is how much Rendell trusts her reader. The prose is clean and controlled, never over-explaining, letting atmosphere and implication do the work. Wexford himself is drawn with characteristic depth — curious, humane, occasionally wrong — and his process of thinking through a problem feels less like procedure and more like genuine moral inquiry. At just over two hundred pages, the novel is bracingly economical, the kind of book that uses every scene and wastes nothing.