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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 20 |
 The Canadian edition, out in late 2006 |
Ron reviews Ruth Rendell's new mystery |
 The U.S. edition, due out July 17, 2007 |
Rendell's new thriller
probes a strange family
of TheColumnists.com
Ruth Rendell has been writing about them for so long that I'm about convinced that England is crammed chockfull of dysfunctional families. And you can be sure at least one member of each family she describes is going to be involved in committing murder.
Take the case of "The Water's Lovely" (Doubleday Canada, $34.95), in which a two-story house in London is shared by two middle-aged sisters and one of the sisters' two unmarried daughters. They've all been living with a terrible secret for more than 20 years.
You see, that was when Guy, who was recovering from a terrible bout of flu, drowned in his bath. Guy was the husband of the elder sister, Beatrix. Beatrix and her daughter, Ismay, came home together one day and found Ismay's teenage sister, Heather, coming down the staircase from the upstairs rooms, her dress soaked with water and her face drained of color. Rushing upstairs, Beatrix and Ismay found Guy dead in a tub full of soapy water, a victim of drowning.
Beatrix never quite recovered from the shock and now is quite mad, spouting literary nonsense and scriptural quotes, rarely leaving her upstairs rooms. Before she lost her senses, though, she had the presence of mind to concoct a story to protect Heather from intense police scutiny: Heather was with Ismay and Beatrix on their outing and was with them when they discovered Guy's body.
No charges were ever filed. The detectives who investigated concluded that Guy either committed suicide or had passed out in the tub and drowned by accident. Ismay has her own opinion, though: She knows that Heather saw Guy making inappropriate advances to her several times before his death. She also must have noticed that Ismay, despite her own youth, had welcomed her stepfather's lovemaking.
In her mind, Ismay believes her younger sister murdered Guy in order to keep him from raping her older sister. What Heather didn't know was that Ismay longed for sexual intercourse with her stepfather.
That was then--and some 20 years later, the mystery of what really happened that day looms over the household. The house has been divided into two flats--an upper one inhabited by the ailing Beatrix and her unmarried sister, Pamela, who has come to live with her and take care of her. Downstairs, sisters Ismay and Heather share the lower flat.
The pot begins to boil up when Heather starts seeing Edmund, a lonely young man who's anxious to move out of the large home he shares with his mother. He is attracted to Heather, who has never had a really successful romance since the death of her stepdad. Ismay, whose own romantic life has never jelled since that tragedy, fears that Edmund will desert Heather if he ever finds out she killed her stepdad. But isn't it unfair for him not to know? What if Heather is capable of killing again?
Then Ismay meets handsome young Andrew, a ladies' man who covets her and talks her into letting him move into the flat she shares with Heather. He's a callous type and resents the presence of Heather and her boy friend. He begins to mistreat Ismay and has eyes for Eva, a beautiful and rich socialite. If he dumps the fragile Ismay, what with Heather, her loyal protector, do about it?
While this is shaping up, single sister Pamela also begins to find love for the first time with a suitor--the handsome, but rigid Ivan, a man very capable of exploding in violent rages. Now in her 50s, Pamela senses she won't have many other opportunities to find a man, so she tolerates the brutish Ivan, perhaps too much for her own health.
The dysfunctional family finally begins to come apart at the seams when a wickedly ambitious woman named Marion, a potential murderess, crosses their path. She learns the secret Ismay has been hiding for all these years and concocts a blackmail scheme. She doesn't realize that the older man she's cultivating as a possible husband is a retired police detective who worked on the case involving the drowned stepfather.
When all these elements begin to build in typical Ruth Rendell pressure cooker style, you know somebody's going to blow up soon and there'll be hell to pay for everyone.
Rendell isn't just the empress of crime fiction in the UK, she'a also a master at interweaving psychological motives and using them to produce tremendous tension as we all wonder who's going to survive when the nasty stuff finally hits the fan. She's at her best with "The Water's Lovely," a phrase, by the way, that turns out to be the key to the resolution of this tantalizing mystery.
I purchased the Canadian edition of this thriller earlier this month in Vancouver, B.C. It was first published in England and the UK in the fall of 2006, but isn't due for publication here in the U.S. until July. If you're willing to wait, the book will cost you a lot less--$25.95 retail price or less than $18 from online booksellers. If you can't wait and don't mind the higher price, the Canadian version is now available online.
Whatever you decide, don't let this mystery
get by you. Rendell is doing her best work these days and you
won't find many mysteries this year that will entertain you as
much as this one will.
©2007 by Ron Miller. The book cover reproductions are courtesy of the publishers. This column first posted May 21, 2007
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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