By Ruth Rendell
356 pages; Crown

The creepiest thing in Ruth Rendell's latest mystery, The Water's Lovely (Crown), isn't the murder (they found him drowned in the tub, and ten years later, the traumatic memory keeps surfacing), or the woman's obsession with her peculiar sister, or their traumatized mother spouting passages from Revelations, but the deep chill that can pervade human interactions—even (or especially) when a person is, like the haunted narrator, "fathoms deep in love."

— Cathleen Medwick