Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (née Grasemann; born 17 February 1930), is an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.

Rendell's best-known creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, is the hero of many popular police stories, some of them successfully adapted for TV.

But Rendell has also generated a separate brand of crime-fiction that explores deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated.

This theme is developed further in a third series of novels, written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine.