Ruth Rendell
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (née Grasemann; born 17 February 1930), is an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries. Rendell's best-known creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, is the hero of many popular police stories, some of them successfully adapted for TV. But Rendell has also generated a separate brand of crime-fiction that explores deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. This theme is developed further in a third series of novels, written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine.