Ruth Rendell
ISBN
Publisher: Seal Books
Published: Oct 1, 2004
Starred Review. British veteran Rendell (_The Rottweiler_) delivers the best novel she's written in years, featuring elderly Gwendolen Chawcer and her younger tenant-in-the-attic, "Mix" Cellini. The unlikely housemates share St. Blaise House, Chawcer's rotting London mansion, full of many generations of dead insects and past dreams of upper-middle-class glory. Both Chawcer and Cellini are looking for love in all the wrong places. Boozy, delusional Cellini—who earns his keep fixing fitness equipment and is a "fan" of real-life murderer Harold Christie—obsesses about supermodel Nerissa Nash. He'll do anything to snag her attention and assume his "rightful" place as her husband. The Miss Havisham–like Chawcer pines for Dr. Stephen Reeves, whom she last saw when he attended her dying mother in 1953. Cellini spins out of control first, killing a clingy, "unworthy" date, then hiding her beneath the floorboards in his apartment. Rendell exhibits all her trademark virtues: vivid characters, a plot addictive as crack and a sense of place unequaled in crime fiction. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The British crime novelist Ruth Rendell is the author of fifty-odd books in which things go horribly, intricately wrong. (Her creepiest, most disturbing novels are written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.) In her latest, a fitness-machine repairman's dual fixations-on a famous Notting Hill serial killer, hanged half a century before, and on a young black model in thrall to a soothsayer-collide. The novel lacks the modifying, likable intelligence that Rendell's recurrent character, Chief Inspector Wexford, brings to other of her works, and the result is a wan puzzler painted in broad strokes. However, her portrait of the repairman's landlady-a Miss Havisham among her scruffy bits and bobs, who reads Darwin and seems to take a dim view of the evolution of man post-1900-has the zany, wry touch of a master. Copyright © 2005
Description:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. British veteran Rendell (_The Rottweiler_) delivers the best novel she's written in years, featuring elderly Gwendolen Chawcer and her younger tenant-in-the-attic, "Mix" Cellini. The unlikely housemates share St. Blaise House, Chawcer's rotting London mansion, full of many generations of dead insects and past dreams of upper-middle-class glory. Both Chawcer and Cellini are looking for love in all the wrong places. Boozy, delusional Cellini—who earns his keep fixing fitness equipment and is a "fan" of real-life murderer Harold Christie—obsesses about supermodel Nerissa Nash. He'll do anything to snag her attention and assume his "rightful" place as her husband. The Miss Havisham–like Chawcer pines for Dr. Stephen Reeves, whom she last saw when he attended her dying mother in 1953. Cellini spins out of control first, killing a clingy, "unworthy" date, then hiding her beneath the floorboards in his apartment. Rendell exhibits all her trademark virtues: vivid characters, a plot addictive as crack and a sense of place unequaled in crime fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From
The British crime novelist Ruth Rendell is the author of fifty-odd books in which things go horribly, intricately wrong. (Her creepiest, most disturbing novels are written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.) In her latest, a fitness-machine repairman's dual fixations-on a famous Notting Hill serial killer, hanged half a century before, and on a young black model in thrall to a soothsayer-collide. The novel lacks the modifying, likable intelligence that Rendell's recurrent character, Chief Inspector Wexford, brings to other of her works, and the result is a wan puzzler painted in broad strokes. However, her portrait of the repairman's landlady-a Miss Havisham among her scruffy bits and bobs, who reads Darwin and seems to take a dim view of the evolution of man post-1900-has the zany, wry touch of a master.
Copyright © 2005