More of the same, I'm afraid, from a writer whose work is becoming more and more formulaic. Perhaps it's her prolificacy that is causing her to spread herself too thinly. After all, writing under her own name and that of Barbara Vine, she has quite often produced two books a year.
Whatever, this present offering has to be a disappointment to even her most ardent fans. I certainly found large swathes of it boring, especially those sections dealing with the life, or lack of it, of tooth-grindingly dreary Minty.
One of life's misfits, she lives alone in the house her aunt left her, works in a dry-cleaners, has nice neighbours (Sonovia and her policeman husband, Laf), and spends her time bathing and looking at herself naked. She also sees ghosts, especially the shade of her one and only boyfriend, Jock, whom she believes died in the Paddington train crash of 1999. Not alone did she lose her true love, but also the money she inherited from her aunt, which disappeared with Jock into the wild blue yonder.
Then there is Zillah, whose husband, Jerry, also appears to have perished in said rail crash. But she, knowing him for the rascal he was, believes he is still alive and sowing his wild oats elsewhere. And how right she is, for Jock/Jerry is now Jeff and is living in West Hampstead with Fiona, whose income as an investment banker is keeping him in luxury.
Of the three women, Zillah is the one who wishes most that conman J-J-J is really dead. Fed up with being an impecunious wife and mother, she accepts the marriage proposal of gay Conservative MP Jim Jims, laying herself open to a charge of bigamy if Jerry were to turn up once more on her doorstep. A little later, at the pictures, J-J-J is indeed skewered by a knife-wielding assassin. Is it Minty? Is it Zillah? Is it Fiona? Is it Uncle Tom Cobbley? Who cares?
The book has quite a large cast of characters, who sort of fibrillate round the three central ones, all of them doing boring things and adding little to the narrative. Either Rendell herself became bored with this novel, or she wrote it with her mind on something else. Let's hope that the something else is a new book that will exhibit her strengths. In the meantime, I'd class Adam and Eve and Pinch Me as a pass from a writer who used formerly to figure top of the class.
Vincent Banville's detective novel, Cannon Law, will be published in October