A "favourite" crime or thriller writer is, to me, one the whole corpus of whose work I sit down and re-read every now and again. Next in line to the favourites—or, as I would call them, the classics—are the writers the whole oeuvre of whom I can imagine myself re-reading in five or ten years time. The essence of the character of a near-favourite is, of course, that one cannot be certain of that future pleasure: one can only hope for it…. In Ruth Rendell's Shake hand...