Ruth Rendell, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Minty is a woman with an obsessive-compulsive disorder and she can’t bear dirt. Since she has lost her boyfriend Jock in a train crash, she washes herself, her clothes and cleans her house even more often than before. Her neighbors pity her and invite her to the cinema once a week. She begins to see what she calls Jock’s ghost: is she mad or is Jock still alive?
Zillah is a shallow woman in her late twenties with two children. When her childhood friend, gay MP Jims Melcombe-Smith proposes her to maintain respectability, she sees a way out of poverty. But there is a big impediment to their marriage…
The Jarveys are a strange couple: she can’t control her weight gain and he, on the other side, suffers from an eating disorder. Their friend and neighbor, Fiona, is about to marry a man they don’t like…
What this persons have in common is what the reader learns as the story develops. Ambition, deception and murder are the ingredients of this mystery. The murder will impact the lives of all the characters involved, in different ways. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is not a whodunit (if you’re looking for whodunits, read the more classical Wexford mysteries by Rendell), nor is it fast-paced. It is rather a whydunit, delving into the remotest corners of a murderer’s mind (much like the BBC’s series Murder in Mind) and exploring its multi-facetted madness.
Rendell’s best achievement is the unique and oppressive atmosphere she manages to create by shifting from one of her unusual characters’ consciousness to another’s. The atmosphere she thus manages to bring to life is haunting and the reader keeps turning the pages. However, her novels are uneven. A Sight for Sore Eyes, The Crocodile Bird or The Keys to the Street among others are excellent (not to mention the Wexford mysteries or the novels she wrote as Barbara Vine, like Anna’s Book, which have a completely different style), cleverly plotted and with all pieces falling into place at the end. In Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, on the contrary, the plot is not as tight as usual: The Rendell’s touch is there but the spark is absent. Still, an average Rendell is better than the best of most mystery writers…
Rating: 3,5/5
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