Adam and Eve and Pinch ME Rendell, Ruth

Minty is haunted by her dead fiancé — except he's not dead. Jock is very much alive, married to someone else, and has no idea the woman he left years ago still sees him everywhere. Her obsession with cleanliness, her rituals, her ghostly visions — they're all woven into Ruth Rendell's most unsettling psychological crime novel. Meanwhile, a con artist plays a dangerous game of identity theft, and the two stories collide in ways that feel inevitable and horrifying. Rendell strips away the procedural polish of detective fiction and gets inside the minds of people who can't escape themselves. The crime here isn't just what happens — it's the erasure of reality that precedes it. If you love tightly wound psychological tension and narrators you can't quite trust, this is Rendell at her chilling best.