Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell Narrated by Davina Porter

Overview

Acknowledged as one of today's premier mystery writers, Ruth Rendell has won three Edgar Awards and four Gold Dagger Awards. She received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded the Commander of the British Empire. Among her most popular books are those in the Inspector Wexford series. Harm Done presents the inspector with a most volatile challenge: the various guises of domestic abuse. The residents of a shabby housing complex in the London suburb of Kingsmarkham are furious. A convicted pedophile, released from prison, has returned to their community. At the same time, two young women disappear, each returning several days later with little memory of where she has been. As Wexford investigates, Kingsmarkham is rocked by violence and murder. To prevent further harm, the inspector must coax some surprising motives from the reluctant suspects. Narrator Davina Porter gives an absorbing performance of Rendell's finely-crafted, suspenseful work.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

Inspector Wexford Returns

Ruth Rendell's long, varied career has been a constant source of astonishment and pleasure. Since the appearance of her first novel, From Doon with Death in 1964, she has published nearly 50 books, most of which fall into three general categories. There are the Inspector Wexford novels, a long-running series of police procedurals set in the fictional Sussex village of Kingsmarkham. There are the psychological thrillers, such as The Bridesmaid, The Crocodile Bird, and Live Flesh, many of which contain eerily precise renderings of violent, abnormal mental states. Finally, there are the Barbara Vine novels, subtle, sometimes leisurely narratives that straddle the imaginary boundary between mainstream and genre fiction.

Rendell's latest, Harm Done, is a Wexford novel, the first since 1997's Road Rage and one of the longest, most ambitious entries in the series. In this one, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford is confronted with an assortment of investigations that intersect -- or appear to intersect -- at a number of points. For reasons that will eventually become obvious, Wexford later comes to think of this intertwining series of occurrences as the Children's Crusade.

Harm Done opens with the disappearance of a not-quite-retarded 16-year-old named Lizzie Cromwell. Three days after her abduction, Lizzie returns home, obviously unharmed but unable -- or unwilling -- to explain her absence. (She is also, as Wexford quickly learns, pregnant, a circumstance that may or may not be related to her disappearance.) One week later, a college student named Rachel Holmes -- older, brighter, more aggressive than Lizzie -- vanishes in a similar fashion. She, too, returns within three days and is equally unwilling to cooperate with local investigators. Shortly afterward, the three-year-old daughter of a wealthy airline executive also disappears, stolen from her bedroom in the small hours of the morning. This particular victim -- Sanchia Devenish -- does not immediately return, and the mystery of her whereabouts provides this complex novel with its dramatic -- and thematic -- center.

Wexford's life -- and village life in general -- is further complicated by two unrelated elements. One concerns the arrival of a once-notorious pedophile -- Thomas Orbe -- who has just been discharged from prison and has taken up residence in Kingsmarkham. When the news of Sanchia Devenish's abduction is made public, Orbe becomes the focal point of the community's outrage, outrage that has violent, ultimately tragic consequences. The second element concerns the presence in Kingsmarkham of a controversial haven for battered women called The Hide. Wexford's daughter Sylvia, a social worker with marital problems of her own, works as a volunteer at The Hide. Through her, Rendell provides us with a window on the grim realities of women victimized by violent, endlessly self-justifying husbands.

In the end, Sylvia's familiarity with the symptoms of marital abuse provides Wexford with the key to Sanchia's disappearance. Studying a group portrait of the Devenish family -- handsome, self-confident husband; pale, self-deprecating wife; blank, expressionless children -- Sylvia understands immediately that Stephen Devenish -- husband, father, extraordinarily successful businessman -- is a wife-beater. Once the nature of life in the Devenish family is made clear to Wexford, he finds his way to the heart of the novel's central mystery and sets in motion a series of events that ends, inevitably, in murder.

Rendell is at the top of her game in this one, skillfully manipulating a large cast of characters and a multitude of subplots to produce a wide-ranging, deeply felt meditation on the infinitely vulnerable institution of the family. The numerous families that populate this novel are threatened, and sometimes destroyed, by the forces of poverty, insanity, greed, ignorance, and, most centrally, violence. Rendell's portraits of battered and beleaguered women, her anger over the lingering belief that domestic violence is somehow "acceptable," and her gradual revelation of the casual brutality of life in the Devenish household combine to give this gritty, aptly titled novel an immediacy, a sense of moral and emotional urgency, that lift it well above the level of more traditional detective stories and onto the level of literature.

During the course of her career, Rendell has won virtually every award that the mystery community can bestow: multiple Edgar awards, multiple Gold Daggers, Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers Association of England. Reading her latest, it's not hard to understand why. Harm Done is a well-constructed, deeply affecting novel. It offers further evidence -- as if further evidence were needed -- that its author is one of the preeminent figures of 20th-century crime fiction.

—Bill Sheehan

barnesandnoble.com

A Letter from Ruth Rendell

After publishing her first Inspector Wexford mystery in 1964, one might think Ruth Rendell had had enough. Not true. The amazing Rendell, clearly one of the genre's preeminent 20th-century talents, returns with Harm Done, her latest Wexford page-turner. In an essay written exclusively for barnesandnoble.com, Ruth Rendell discusses her inspiration for Harm Done: an attempt to bring the very real and tragic issues of pedophilia and domestic abuse to the forefront of popular fiction.

The Political Wexfords by Ruth Rendell

Dear Reader,

For want of a better name, I call them the "political Wexfords." They are the detective stories I write featuring Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden with this difference: As well as being mysteries with, I hope, an exciting plot and a problem in detection to solve, they present aspects of the contemporary social scene.

Simisola was the first of them. That was about racism in the English countryside, that and domestic slavery, the situation in which young women are brought to Britain as family servants, inadequately paid, if paid at all, and virtually imprisoned. The second political Wexford was Road Rage, not an investigation of that phenomenon whereby people involved in road incidents or accidents abuse each other, but concerning the environment. It exposed the rage people feel when a new road is built through their countryside, often contrary to their wishes and needs.

Harm Done, the third of these, is both darker and lighter than its predecessors. There is some light relief and humor to offset the very disturbing problems of pedophilia and domestic violence with which the narrative is concerned, but the major part of the book is devoted to exposing what really goes on when a brutal man -- in this case a wealthy, middle-class man -- habitually beats up and tortures his wife.

As a member of the Board of Management of Refuges for Abused Women, I have for some time now been involved in movements to counter domestic violence. Talking to some of the women who have suffered at the hands of husbands and partners, and hearing their shocking and often tragic stories, led me to decide I must write about all this. In the context of a detective novel and the exciting narrative this implies, I wanted to let readers know what savagery in the home really is, why women in this situation remain in it, how children, too, suffer, perhaps irrevocably, and how, strangely, those to whom being such a victim or perpetrator is unthinkable, shy away from the problem.

Harm Done is different from anything I have previously written in that, although the names, the setting, and the family pattern are my own invention, everything that happens to the victim has happened to some woman somewhere. Every word uttered has been spoken by some abused woman or some brutal man caught up in this dreadful situation. What happens in HARM DONE really happens, across all classes and ethnic groups, to the poor and the rich, the young -- and because bad habits die very hard -- to the old as well. And the biggest fallacy of all is that this only happens when the man has been drinking.

I wanted to write about it and I have. While my readers enjoy this mystery and reacquainting themselves with Wexford and his family, I hope it will also open their eyes and help them to understand.

--Ruth Rendell, November 4, 1999

Diane White

Fans of Ruth Rendell's work can't help wondering how she does it. How does she turn out so many wonderful novels, sometimes two or three a year, year after year? The woman is clearly some kind of genius who deserves all the many honors that have come, and continue to come, her way.
— Boston Globe

Ottawa Citizen

Rendell just seems to get sharper and sharper.

Chronicle-Herald

British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for whom no superlative is sufficient.

New Yorker

Rendell’s clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.

Gazette (Montreal)

No one plays head games quite as well as Rendell.

Los Angeles Times

Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.

Patricia Craig

Harm Done is not so much a murder mystery (although a murder does eventually take place) as a novel evoking one kind of abuse after another, detailing all the symptoms of a vast malaise...[A]ll this is recounted in Ruth Rendell's usual manner which is unimpassioned, shrewd, and faintly ironic...a lively speculative tone is maintained throughout.
—From The Times Literary Supplement.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170702282
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	05/06/2011
Series:	Chief Inspector Wexford Series , #18
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead the police and her family and neighbors had already begun the search for her body. They worked on the open countryside between Kingsmarkham and Myringham, combing the hillsides and beating through the woods. It was April but cold and wet, and a sharp northeast wind was blowing. Their task was not a pleasant one; no one laughed or joked and there was little talking.

Lizzie’s stepfather was among the searchers, but her mother was too upset to leave the house. The evening before, the two of them had appeared on television to appeal for Lizzie to come home, for her abductor or attacker, whatever he might be, to release her. Her mother said she was only sixteen, which was already known, and that she had learning difficulties, which was not. Her stepfather was a lot younger than her mother, perhaps ten years, and looked very young. He had long hair and a beard and wore several earrings, all in the same ear. After the television appearance several people phoned Kingsmarkham Police Station and opined that Colin Crowne had murdered his stepdaughter. One said Colin had buried her on the building site down York Street, a quarter of a mile down the road from where the Crownes and Lizzie lived on the Muriel Campden Estate. Another told Detective Sergeant Vine that she had heard Colin Crowne threaten to kill Lizzie “because she was as thick as two planks.”

“Those folks as go on telly to talk about their missing kids,” said a caller who refused to give her name, “they’re always the guilty ones. It’s always the dad. I’ve seen it time and time again. If you don’t know that, you’ve no business being in the police.”

Chief Inspector Wexford thought she was dead. Not because of what the anonymous caller said, but because all the evidence pointed that way. Lizzie had no boyfriend, she was not at all precocious, she had a low IQ and was rather slow and timid. Three evenings before, she had gone with some friends on the bus to the cinema in Myringham, but at the end of the film the other two girls had left her to come home alone. They had asked her to come clubbing with them but Lizzie had said her mother would be worried—the friends thought Lizzie herself was worried at the idea—and they left her at the bus stop. It was just before eight-thirty and getting dark. She should have been home in Kingsmarkham by nine-fifteen, but she didn’t come home at all. At midnight her mother had phoned the police.

If she had been, well, a different sort of girl, Wexford wouldn’t have paid so much attention. If she had been more like her friends. He hesitated about the phrase he used even in his own mind, for he liked to keep to his personal brand of political correctness in his thoughts as well as his speech. Not to be absurd about it, not to use ridiculous expressions like intellectually challenged, but not to be insensitive either and call a girl such as Lizzie Cromwell mentally handicapped or retarded. Besides, she wasn’t either of those things, she could read and write, more or less, she had a certain measure of independence and went about on her own. In daylight, at any rate. But she wasn’t fit just the same to be left alone after dark on a lonely road. Come to that, what girl was?

So he thought she was dead. Murdered by someone. What he had seen of Colin Crowne he hadn’t much liked, but he had no reason to suspect him of killing his stepdaughter. True, some years before he married Debbie Cromwell, Crowne had been convicted of assault on a man outside a pub, and he had another conviction for taking and driving away—in other words, stealing—a car. But what did all that amount to? Not much. It was more likely that someone had stopped and offered Lizzie a lift.

“Would she accept a lift from a stranger?” Vine had asked Debbie Crowne.

“Sometimes it’s hard to make her like understand things,” Lizzie’s mother had said. “She’ll sort of say yes and no and smile—she smiles a lot, she’s a happy kid—but you don’t know if it’s like sunk in. Do you, Col?”

“I’ve told her never talk to strangers,” said Colin Crowne. “I’ve told her till I’m blue in the face, but what do I get? A smile and a nod and another smile, then she’ll just say something else, something loony, like the sun’s shining or what’s for tea.”

“Not loony, Col,” said the mother, obviously hurt.

“You know what I mean.”

So when she had been gone three nights and it was the morning of the third day, Colin Crowne and the neighbors on either side of the Crownes on the Muriel Campden Estate started searching for Lizzie. Wexford had already talked to her friends and the driver of the bus she should have been on but hadn’t been on, and Inspector Burden and Sergeant Vine had talked to dozens of motorists who used that road daily around about that time. When the rain became torrential, which happened at about four in the afternoon, they called off the search for that day, but they were set to begin again at first light. Taking DC Lynn Fancourt with him, Wexford went over to Puck Road for another talk with Colin and Debbie Crowne.

When it was built in the sixties, on an open space that would now be called a “green field area,” between the top of York Street and the western side of Glebe Road, the three streets and block of flats on a green in the midst of them, it had been called the York Estate. The then chairman of the housing committee, who had done A Midsummer Night’s Dream for his school certificate and was proud of the knowledge thus gained, named the streets after characters in that comedy, Oberon, Titania, and Puck.

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