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. Yes, there is a murder to solve, but that incident takes forever to happen in the book. Once the murder has occurred, it is almost relegated to a secondary plot point as far as importance goes.This is a well-written book with believable characters. Unfortunately, it reads like a soap opera. Sometimes I think how interesting it would be to pick a small apartment building and write the stories of each inhabitant. Ruth Rendell has done that, and far more skillfully than most. The "flat dwellers" in her London building are a motley crew to be sure, and thus it doesn't surprise how many of their stories end badly. Rendell is able to draw such telling portraits that she mirrors many of the attributes of humanity, humans recognizable to all of us. Not a usual Rendell mystery which is not to say that there is no mystery included, resulting, along with her skillful psychological insight, in a refreshingly different, intriguing novel.
Do You like book Tigerlily's Orchids (2010)?
Meh. Rendell's most recent novels just can't match her earlier ones. Disappointment.
—kim
Enjoyed it, but found it to be NOT as compelling as other Rendell books.
—jojo539
