Rendell, Ruth. The Rottweiler. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003. ISBN 1-4000-5190-8.

Summary: The intersecting secrets and crimes of the residents of a rooming house in contemporary London, and the employees of the antique shop on its ground floor, structure the plot of this ingenious novel of suspense. The most serious of these crimes is a series of five murders, and the most melancholy parts of the book are the passages in which the killer reflects on these murders and tries to infer what deep-seated psychological trauma could possibly have motivated them.

Another of Rendell's favorite themes, however, is that everyone has secrets, and that most of those secrets loom much larger in one's own mind that in anyone else's. The characters are elegantly balanced and differentiated by what they perceive and fail to perceive about one another.