If you are a fan of Ruth Rendell’s work, you will have noticed that recently two unthinkable things have happened. Firstly, in The Monster in the Box, her much loved Chief Inspector Wexford retired, and then in her latest book The Vault, she has produced her first sequel in her catalogue of over seventy titles. The Vault is not just unusual in being a sequel, however, it also brings the two distinct strands of her work (the Wexford novel and the non-Wexford crime thriller) together into an intriguing and compelling whole.

Reg Wexford (plain old Mr these days) is taking some time to adjust to no longer being a member of Kingsmarkham’s police force. Making an effort to keep himself busy, he and his wife Dora start dividing their time between their country home and their daughter’s coach house in London.

Ruth Rendell

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“Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales”.

Jasper Rees is a thoroughly English man; born in London, educated at Harrow, and brought up to cheer whenever he crossed the Severn Bridge in an eastward direction. But despite this background, he admits to an “unfilled sense of ancestral belonging” whenever he crosses the border to visit his grandparents in Carmarthen. This is what the Welsh call hiraeth – a deep longing to be somewhere (the nearest you can get to it in English is probably “homesickness”, although the translation isn’t quite literal). Jasper’s hiraeth led him to establish Project Wales, an attempt to explore his Welsh ancestry, to reclaim his roots and to live up to his surname by way of a book deal that produced the wonderfully titled Bred of Heaven.

So how do you set about doing something as nebulous as reclaiming your ancestry?

Jasper Rees

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Twenty years ago, three uniquely talented men decided that there was far too much unsolved crime in the world, and set out to use their talents to do something about it. Put like that, this sounds like a story about a batman-style avenger of the wronged, but the true tale of The Murder Room is something altogether more remarkable. These three men – a former FBI agent, a forensic artist and a criminal profiler – are the founder members of the Vidocq Society, a pro bono crime-fighting society based in Philadelphia, named in honour of Eugene Vidocq, the head of the first known private detective agency. The Society is little publicised but has done a huge amount of valuable work over the years.

Michael Capuzzo

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Warwickshire, August 1780.

Deep in the countryside near Rugby stands the Tudor manor house of Lawford Hall, occupied this summer by Sir Theodosius Boughton, his mother Anna Maria, his sister Theodosia, brother-in-law John Donellan, the Donellans’ two young children, and a handful of servants. It is early in the morning of 30th August and something is about to happen that will bring notoriety and scandal to the Boughton household.

Sir Theodosius, aged 20 and suffering from venereal disease he contracted at Eton some five years earlier, has just woken and is visited in his bedchamber by his mother. Anna Maria was keen for her son to take the medicine made up for him by the local apothecary Mr Powell in the hope that it might cure him; he, on the other hand, seems reluctant to take it as a dose he received from the same man the previous week made him ill.

Elizabeth Cooke

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Roy H Williams once wrote, “lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”. This is a question that many of us will struggle to answer coherently, I suspect, but not Robert Penn. For Penn is a man with enthusiasm for all things pedal-powered; he has ridden a bike for thirty-six years, on nearly every day of his adult life, including one 40,000km, three-year, round the world trip as an apparent reaction to having been a pin-striped solicitor for too long. As his book “it’s all about the bike” – a cheeky riposte to Lance Armstrong’s best-selling biography about recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France – opens, Penn owns five bikes in various states of repair, but has decided he needs a new one. “I could go online right now with a credit card and spend £3000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike” he writes. “It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly…I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it…I want MY bike.”

Robert Penn

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How do you even begin to write about a book like this? A book so unlike any you have read before, a book so absorbing, so original, so intelligent and so magnificently written? A book that makes you want to rush home from work just so that you can pick it up again and find out what happens next? It’s not any easy thing to do, I can tell you. I am sure that many people have been put off trying the His Dark Materials series (of which this is the second installment) because it has been unfairly labelled as children’s fiction; let me assure you that this is a story that works on many levels and is just as good for adults as it is for children. It is the best fantasy adventure I have read since the Chronicles of Narnia (and that, for me, is saying a lot). So, how do I begin? Well, the opening seems like a good place…

“Will tugged at his mother’s hand and said, ‘Come on, come on…’. But his mother hung back. She was still afraid.

Phillip Pullman

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Deep in the stillness of a remote Norwegian forest, there stands a house with a view over a lake. A quiet queue of people stands at the door to the house, patiently waiting their turn. Old and young, male and female, in small groups or alone, everyone waits silently for the person in the house to answer their unspoken pleas. On the other side of the door there lives an author, a writer whose job it is to tell the tale of each person in the queue. Once a year she invites the next person in line to come into the house and have their story told by her. At the front of the queue tonight is a young woman with a dead baby in her arms, but as the author retires to bed wondering what the woman’s story will be, she is startled to hear the front door open and footsteps hesitantly mount the stairs. A man enters the author’s bedroom and stands at the foot of her bed. He is a socially awkward middle aged man who fears his tale might be too nondescript to tell, and he has jumped the queue to speak to the author directly. After some discussion, the author is drawn into naming this man – Alvar Eide – and to ignoring the young woman who waits outside in favour of writing Alvar’s story.

Karin Fossum

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It can’t be easy writing a history book when you are the son of Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose senior was a writer of many popular books – including the Band of Brothers tome that was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s HBO series of the same name – on a grand scale. Slate referred to him in 2002 as, “a history factory, using his five kids as researchers and assistants to streamline the production process”. It was in this production line that Hugh Ambrose learned his trade as a writer of popular American history. It may seem that the only obstacle in junior’s way was the hard task of living up to his father, but personally I read this book just hoping that the plagiarism scandals that dogged the last part of Stephen’s life were not part of the apprenticeship that Hugh served.

Hugh Ambrose has claimed that he did not set out to write Band of Brothers 2 when he wrote The Pacific, although that is largely what it is (all the more so given the same production team made a series of the same name, using Ambrose as the historical consultant, and have named this the “official companion book” for the series).

Hugh Ambrose

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In 1095, Byzantium was an empire under threat. From his seat in Constantinople, Emperor Alexius saw his territories across the Bosphorus in Anatolia coming under intense pressure from the Seljuk Turks, a Muslim people originating in central Asia who were steadily overrunning provinces that has been in the empire since Roman times. The Seljuks were not intruders to be taken lightly, and had succeeded not just in taking control of many Byzantine towns, but had also met the cream of the imperial army in combat and cut it to shreds. Faced with potentially catastrophic losses of land and power, he issued a plea for help to the Christians of the West to supply soldiers to come to his aid.

Tim Severin

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“We owe our state of government to it, but most of us have little idea who fought whom or why. Nor do most of us care…yet it made us the country we are, the people we are” – Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History

The English civil war was the beginning of the modern age in Britain. While everybody knows that a King was executed and battles fought between Roundheads and Cavaliers, most people are unaware that, proportionally, more of England’s population was killed in this conflict than in either the First or Second World Wars. It had a huge impact on the country we know today. Yet, despite this, it seems to be an unfashionable era to portray in fiction, and I have come across relatively few novels set at this time. This made me all the more eager to read Peter Ransley’s new novel, Plague Child, the first in a new trilogy set during this tumultuous period.

Peter Ransley

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“My brother’s a poker player, but he isn’t a gambler, not really. That’s no thanks to Grandpa Sam. When we were little, Sam gave us a comprehensive education in blackjack, which he called pontoon. Here was the lesson: he was always the dealer and we always lost”. From such beginnings, Victoria Coren has ended up doing rather well out of cards. She has learnt to play well enough to join a professional poker team and collect career winnings of $1.5 million, and has become the first female European champion at the game; this book is the story of those wins and how she got there from being a shy, awkward and unhappy schoolgirl losing to her grandfather at blackjack. (Incidentally, my granddad also taught me to play pontoon when I was little, but lacking a slightly disreputable older sibling to later teach me the rules of poker, I have not become a millionaire player. Or a millionaire anything for that matter.

Victoria Coren

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