Ruth Rendell: Vanity Dies Hard (UK 1990)

From the Publisher:
Who would have believed that Alice Whittaker's life could change? She was thirty-seven, rich but dowdy, with no career. Her life a lonely failure, she had got by with the one thing she did have: money.

Then handsome Andrew Fielding came into her life and just as suddenly her beautiful friend Nesta vanished from it, leaving behind a trail of broken questions and confused clues.

Now nothing is as it seems - and in this darker world below anything can be done by anyone - even murder.

'The best woman crime writer since Sayers, Christie, Allingham and Marsh' -- SUNDAY TIMES

Ruth Rendell: Vanity Dies Hard. London: Arrow, 1990, ISBN: 0099369206, 182 p., £3.50.

Ruth Rendell: Vanity Dies Hard (USA 1980)

From the Publisher:
"FOR READERS WHO HAVE ALMOST GIVEN UP MYSTERIES... RENDELL MAY BE JUST THE WOMAN TO GET THEM STARTED AGAIN." -- ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE

RUTH RENDELL
COULD IT BE THAT HER ATTRACTIVE YOUNG HUSBAND WAS A MYSTERIOUS MURDERER?
Wealthy Alice, recently married to a handsome man ten years younger, is worried about her glamorous friend Nesta. Nesta, it seems, has disappeared.

But when Alice tries to solve the mystery of Nesta's whereabouts, she begins to suspect that she herself is in danger -- letters sent to and answered from a house that doesn't exist... disturbing hints about her husband's real relationship with Nesta... a chronic, agonizing illness that just might be due to deliberate poisoning.

Slowly, Alice begins to see a terrifying picture of the peril that threatens her marriage -- and her life.

"FIRST RATE ENTERTAINMENT. THIS IS A LADY WHOSE WORK IT IS TIME TO GET ACQUAINTED WITH." -- SATURDAY REVIEW

Ruth Rendell: Vanity Dies Hard. Ballantine Books, ISBN: 0345292863 (October, 1980), 152 p., $1.95.