DARK CORNERS By Ruth Rendell Doubleday, 288 pages, $22.95

Ruth Rendell died on May 2, 2015, of a stroke at age 85, leaving behind a long history of honours — including 18 years as a Life Peer in the House of Lords for the Labour Party and one last brilliant and disturbing novel.

Dark Corners presents a collection of men and women in their 20s whose lives intersect in London’s Maida Vale neighbourhood. Some characters are more or less harmlessly immoral; one is for sure a psychopath, though it takes a while in the book’s precisely measured plot for the psychopathy to reveal itself.

Then events, which have been merely fascinating, take on a terrible sense of dread in the inimitable Rendell fashion.