If you read only one inspector Wexford . . . From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell, with an introduction by Ian Rankin (Arrow, 50th anniversary edition) R180Farewell to Rendell, who died at the weekend, aged 85. This, her 1964 debut, is the first Wexford, in which the good inspector investigates the violent and rather passionate death of a seemingly religious and respectable woman. Be warned, though, you'll want to get stuck into the rest of the series - all 23 of them. Dark Corners, Rendell's last book, completed shortly before she fell ill, will be with us in October. It's not a Wexford.The issueChelsea were crowned Premier League champions just as I was reading reviews of The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup (Simon & Schuster) by the British investigative journalists Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert. It hardly seemed the same sport.By all accounts, Blake and Calvert's book is a compulsive thriller, although it adds little to the sordid tale of Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari billionaire whose machinations and distribution of financial and political favours bought his country the 2022 World Cup; this is largely a fleshing-out of the story they broke last year.Sadly, their newspaper reports, shocking as they were, changed nothing: the tournament - against all odds and sense - will be played in a country with little football tradition and summer temperatures of up to 50°C and where Nepalese migrant labourers, contracted to build stadiums, have died in the heat. According to The Guardian, Nepalese authorities claim there were 188 casualties last year and 168 in 2013. A dirty business all round.Crash courseGiven its power and beauty, the British historian AN Wilson was struck by how ignorant today's Western intelligentsia were of the Bible, a text he regards as wildly subversive and iconoclastic. This is despite the fact that, as well read and as educated as they regard themselves to be, their most dearly held values derive directly from the New Testament.Wilson has written The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible (Atlantic), an inquiry into what the Bible is, what it means, how it works and, according to Christopher Hart in the London Sunday Times, "how hopelessly wrong the plodding fundamentalists of both atheist and religious persuasions are about it".Wilson points out that trying to "disprove" the Bible is like trying to disprove Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. "It isn't actually possible to fly upon the viewless wings of Poesy, it breaks all the known laws of aerodynamics." Hmmm. Discuss among yourselves.The bottom line"OMG, I think I might have just gotten raped, he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn't listen." - Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday)..