One of Ruth Rendell's best! I always enjoy her work but sometimes find the endings contrived. This time, the conclusion made perfect sense from the way this splendid author foreshadowed things.Two things I really like about Rendell's Wexford novels:1. She lets many of the minor characters occasi...
Καθαρή,εμπλουτισμένη πλοκή που δεν κουράζει με πολλά στοιχεία και γεγονότα.Η πρώτη προσωπική είσοδος στον κόσμο του επιθεωρητή Γουέξφορντ στέφθηκε με επιτυχία·σίγουρα θα ψάξω και τα υπόλοιπα της σειράς.Η Ρέντελ γράφει με έναν αβίαστο,φυσικό τρόπο που μοιάζει σχεδόν σα να μη προσπαθεί καθόλου.Σα ...
I'm not a soap opera watcher, and I've never before read a book that seemed to be a soap opera. This is that soap opera book.Rendell does an excellent job of storytelling, but this is really just a story about the lives of people living in a community and how their actions effect one another. Y...
Shoot! This was a disappointment. I only bought it because I recognized the author as the woman who wrote A Dark-Adapted Eye under the name of Barbara Vine. Speaker of Mandarin is billed as "A New Inspector Wexford Mystery," but I am not a knowledgeable mystery/detective fiction fan and I fini...
Having never read a Barbara Vine before, but being recommended this book specifically and by someone whose judgement I value, I looked forward to starting it and I wasn't disappointed. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy is an extraordinary, character driven book that tells the story of the Candless family...
A Problem With GenreAs crime fiction goes, The Master of The Moor by Ruth Rendell is perhaps one of the more subtle examples. The action is set in a moorland community, presumably somewhere like North Yorkshire, though the book’s place names are pure invention and geography is not defined. There ...
Ruth Rendell, who died earlier this year, is widely regarded as one of the finest crime novelists of recent times. I understand that her final book, which she completed before her death, will be published this autumn. I have read a fair amount of her work and enjoyed most of it. I was slightly ...
7/14/15: I've listened to this several times over the past few months on audio, superbly performed by Harriet Walter. As many times as I've read the book, I'm still "hearing" new sentences, it seems (I've listened to several other Vines as well during this time, and the same is true of them). Iro...
Read by................ Nigel AnthonyTotal Runtime......... 6 Hours 10 MinsDescription: During the brilliantly depicted rock festival in the grounds of Sundays House, the bands play, the weather is fine, and a good time is had by all except one or two disgruntled locals. Oh, and the sometime...
The Blood Doctor is an absolutely fine mystery, but it's not her best work. That distinction goes to (imho) A Dark-Adapted Eye, probably one of the best mysteries ever written and certainly the favorite of my British Mystery collection. I enjoy settling down with a novel by this author and watchi...
Good stuff, complicated stuff. At the center of this multi-character story is Mary Jago. Mary is a young woman who is having some difficulty getting an abusive boyfriend out of her life entirely. She works at and partly owns an odd tourist attraction: The Irene Adler Museum. Adler was a fictional...
I don't know why short story collections aren't more popular. Small mouthfuls of story are ideal for the times you don't want to commit to some enormous tome. There may be as many words as in a novel, but the frequent changes and pace and characters are refreshing.Some of the first stories have u...
"Shrove House: the palace, the house of pictures and secrets, dolls and keys, books and shadows.""The Crocodile Bird" tem uma introdução bastante misteriosa. Eve e Liza são, respectivamente, mãe e filha. Longe da sociedade, vivem isoladas por opção própria, como residentes da Casa de Shrove, uma ...
This is my first Real experience with Ruth Rendell, and while I haven't read anything of hers, I've heard quite a bit. This is basically another review-in-progress and therefore I Will post short reviews of each story as I read Them, starting, of course, at the very beginning. The Fallen Curtain...
In A Fatal Inversion, by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, we meet a group of young people in Suffolk in the very hot summer of 1976. There is Adam, who has inherited a large home from his great-uncle; Zosie, a waif of a woman for whom Adam and his home is a refuge from the world; Rufus, the...
It would be inaccurate for the reader to classify this book as a mystery, because one can observe the actions of the characters throughout. The proper genre would most aptly be one of suspense. The mystery to me is how Ruth Rendell, unarguably The Queen of the Crime Novel, is able to produce such...
I've read a few Rendell novels before and I couldn't put them down. This one was like a slow lifting of the curtain until finally there are a mass of actors in view and moving about. No question that the acting is interesting and eventually the many individuals began to differentiate themselves b...
Wexford is getting to be an old fogey, needing help from his younger associates to decipher the slang of teenage witnesses. Two teens and their sitter go missing just before Christmas one very rainy winter in Kingsmarkham. Few clues arise easily, the case drags on, Wexford's divorced daughter has...
Set in the late 1980s, this Inspector Wexford mystery is one of my favourites, for it shows Ruth Rendell in top form, masterly presenting us with a puzzle and a subject rarely if ever tackled by male crime writers. As is typical of Rendell's Wexford stories, the inspector's home life and work col...
I can only give this three stars...The mystery is okay, the interplay of characters, the scattering of clues that an astute reader of mystery should be able to discern, but...It's the writing. I love Ruth Rendell: the stories, characters, settings, but the way she writes often totally confuses me...
Martin Urban, a square 28-year-old accountant, wins 100,000 pounds in the football pools thanks to the picks from his attractively louche friend Tim. Martin plans to use the windfall to play Lord Bountiful, bestowing gifts upon strangers to assist them with housing woes (any housing woes his frie...
La ventaja de leer un autor desde sus comienzos es ser testigo en primera fila de cómo va evolucionando su trabajo y mejorando en el oficio de crear historias…comparándola con otros primeras novelas de Rendell –independientes de su personaje estrella, el Inspector Wexford- La casa secreta de la m...
Rendell has a particular genius for showing us the gentle, incremental nature of ordinary madness, of the exponential chaos that may come simply from choosing to live with a decision, no matter how absurd, insane or dangerous it may be... or how very insignificant or reversible, for that matter. ...
With school starting back this week, and with me preparing for one new class and an overall overload, it took me a bit to get through this one. That isn't to say it's bad, just that I was dozing off mid-chapter and not remembering things I'd read. Going back a few pages and asking "did you read t...
This is the 13th Inspector Wexford adventure, who with his side-kick Inspector Mike Burden, solve crimes - usually murders - and keep the citizenry of Sussex, England safe. Although these books are murder mysteries at their core, the author excels - and where she differentiates herself from the "...
Another great Inspector Wexford mystery by Ruth Rendell.In this one three people are killed (slaughtered actually) while eating dinner in a great mansion located in a somewhat secluded, private wooded estate. Yes, they are wealthy. One's a famous author; the other two are her husband and daughter...
Inspector Reg Wexford is something of a dinosaur, albeit a respected one, in the Kingsbridge Constabulary. As usually happens as people age, he is more and more discomposed by current societal attitudes and mores, while his younger colleagues take them for granted. It's a good thing that Reg has ...
I have never really understood what criteria Ruth Rendell applies when deciding whether to publish a book as a Rendell or a Vine. I could understand if all the Wexford novels were one and everything else another, but this isn't so. I am particularly confused now I have listened to Talking to Stra...
This is one of my very favorite Vines, one I seem drawn to re-read every two or three years - I just re-read it this past January - it "called" to me whilst I was in the midst of reading another book, and I couldn't resist!As with many Vines, there are parallel stories - Jenny is in the thrall of...
When I first started reading this book I was interested, then I lost my interest but kept reading and then BOOM, I was hooked. A very unusual story with a cast of misfit characters living in an old schoolhouse where the owner Jarvis, rents out rooms to people in need. The school is situated on ...
Update, May 6, 2015: I am undertaking a Ruth Rendell "key" works project -- the books The Guardian recently noted as such the day of Ruth Rendell's death. From Doon With Death is the first of these . I've just reread this novel again after six years, and while I wouldn't change my rating, I w...
Rendell is a mystery writer I have long enjoyed and this Inspector Wexford has all the usual trappings of a good detective novel: a missing girl, a couple of dead bodies, a lot of suspects and a lot of missing pieces. Rendell juggles all the many plot threads deftly, keeping you guessing at her ...
On any other day when the body of a woman turns up in the underground car park of the main shopping center in Kingsmarkham Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford would quietly and methodically piece together all the elements of the case, breaking down alibis and ferreting out all the secrets people hav...
I really enjoyed this book because it was the appropriate amount of weird. The basic premise is that Peter (Pup) sells his soul to the devil and develops an interest in magic. As he grows in his knowledge of the occult, his sister Dolly's fascination with it grows. This is fueled by the fact that...
"The Fever Tree", more so than any of the other stories in this collection, exemplify Rendell's style. Her murderers are rarely obviously psychopathic killers, nor particularly suave or elegant; they are ordinary people seized by idle curiosity and boredom. "The Fever Tree" examines a couple who,...
This was a very nice collection of short mysteries and a good way to spend part of my weekend. I enjoy Inspector Wexford and his able assistant Burden and the mysteries are well done. The clues were usually there and I figured out whodunit and to some extent whydunit for almost all of them, but...
I was bitterly disappointed with this book after reading so many good reviews and having had a friend recommend it to me. I found the story lack lustre and repetitive, with the same points being repeated continuously, as if Rendell just needed to fill space. The writing to me was childish and imm...
I do love a good Ruth Rendell book, and a strong (Chief) Inspector Wexford tale in particular. And that’s what this is. This, the fifth Wexford story, sees the man himself somewhere between the hard-nosed and frequently rude and bad-tempered upholder of the law, and the thoughtful, cultured, poet...
You can read more reviews at my blog, The Armchair Librarian.I read one of Ms. Rendell's earlier works a couple days before. It was called Master of the Moors. I liked her writing abilities but I did not like the story, unfortunately (yes, it was one of those books). However, I had several of her...
This one took me longer than usual to read. I am an Inspector Wexford series fan.Fat book for a mystery, and especially for a Ruth Rendell mystery. Most of her Wexford books are fairly slim; this was one around 350+ pages. And the title can be misleading. This is NOT a case of two people arguing,...
I’m re-reading A DEMON IN MY VIEW, one of the most highly-regarded novel from Ruth Rendell’s ‘early’ period (in this case, 1976 – it was her 14th novel and 6th stand-alone – as we know, she doesn’t have much good to say about the stand-alones that preceded it, but she hit her stride with DEMON an...
Ruth Rendell's "To Fear a Painted Devil" continues my flirtation with traditional British mystery. While quite dated (the novel feels a bit older than the 49 years since its publication), it is a nice and very fast read. This standalone mystery features a country doctor as the reluctant sleuth, a...
Ruth Rendell novels adapt very well to the audio format and the ones I have listened to have all been enjoyable. Her plots are intricate. Have you seen those pseudo-family trees that "prove" connections between rock stars and royalty, politicians and criminals...? Rendell plots are like that. ...
