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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Rendell