Earlier in her career, Rendell subordinated character to plot, but her later books begin with her characters. She finds "abiding satisfaction" in contemplating perceptive portraits by Old Masters — "Slyness must lurk behind those eyes surely, cruelty in that thinlipped mouth" — and she creates their counterparts for her books, a technique that seems to lend striking verisimilitude to her depictions of distorted personalities.

For some time, Rendell says, she has also been reading and rereading the great Victorian novels, to learn "how to evolve and develop a story and cliffhang my protagonist at the end of a chapter." Each chapter ending of The Veiled One pulls inexorably into the opening of the next, an effect strengthened by Rendell's novelistic reticence, a technique she attributes to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915): the power to suggest and withhold information that she believes is essential...