Kissing the Gunner's Daughter — Ruth Rendell

The blood hod turned the white damask tablecloth a terrible bright red. Later the newspapers would call the triple murder in the magnificent Kingsmarkham country home the "Tancred House massacre." When Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford arrived at the isolated wooded estate, he indeed walked in on a horrific scene. Celebrity writer Davina Flory lay sprawled across the elegant dining room table, as was her middle-aged daughter. Her distinguished husband was dead at the foot of the marble stairs, and her badly wounded seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Daisy, sat huddled by the phone. Only young, pretty Daisy managed to survive. Now she was Wexford's sole witness to a sinister crime that would force him to examine both the tangled relationships of the very rich and his own deepest feelings. And send him after a killer not yet finished with a perverse and chilling plan.