In his new job as a runaway-kid finder in Portland, Oregon, series hero Burke encounters a hardboiled cast of pimps, cops, and drug dealers, in this complex mystery revolving around a serial killer who targets prostitutes.

When the commissaris locates the corpse of a Japanese art dealer, he must descend into the world of the yakuza to locate the killer.

Ruth Rendell’s alter writing ego, Barbara Vine, penetrates the mysteries of a deeply dysfunctional family in this psychological thriller set in the 1960s. The title monster is John Cosway, a diagnosed schizophrenic not permitted by his mother and sisters to stray far from his family home in Essex. The new nurse hired to care for him, Kerstin Kvist, becomes convinced that schizophrenia does not seem to be the cause of John’s symptoms, and that his relatives have a vested interest in maintaining the misdiagnosis.