"Don't forget," Chief Inspector Wexford said, "I've lived in a world where the improbable happens all the time." However, the impossible has happened. Inspector Wexford has retired.
In The Vault – a continuation of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series that includes titles like The Monster In The Box – it becomes clear that Wexford misses his job. So he jumps at Detective Superintendent Tom Ede’s offer to recruit him as an adviser on a difficult case: the bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal hole of a house in St John’s Wood, London.
Wexford is intrigued by the case, and wrongly assumes that this new investigative role won’t put his life in danger.

Biography:
An astonishing 45 years after publication of her first Inspector Reginald Wexford novel, From Doon With Death, Ruth Rendell, remains one of the foremost crime writers of her generation. She is also known as the psychological thriller writer Barbara Vine, and – since her elevation to the UK's House of Lords – as Baroness Rendell of Babergh.