Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Book

Jock Lewis was supposed to have died in the Paddington rail crash - Minty had received a letter from Great Western. But, curiously, the police hadn't been in touch. And Jock had gone off with all her savings. Then there was Zilla. She had also received a letter from the railway company that said her husband was dead. She didn't really believe the story, but chose not to mention her doubts. Jock's ghost reappeared to Minty at home, at work, in the cinema. Minty started to carry a knife . . .

Ruth Rendell, who also writes under the name of Barbara Vine, has won many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. She has also won the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

Among Frances Barber's theatre credits are Camille, Pygmalion, The Seagull and King Lear. She has also appeared in a number of television productions, among them...

Publishers Weekly

HThis latest gem from the British master concerns the wreckage wrought on a variety of Londoners by a womanizing con man who speaks in rhymes. Here, as in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999), Rendell's genius is to create characters so vivid they live beyond the frame of the novel. She pushes the ordinary to the point of the bizarre while remaining consistently believable. Araminta "Minty" Knox, the fragile center of the plot, is a 30-something woman, alone and obsessed with hygiene, who works in a dry-cleaning shop. All the world is a petri dish for Minty, who sees germs everywhere, which she attacks with Wright's Coal Tar Soap. She is equally tormented by the ghosts she imagines, her domineering "Auntie" and the man who took her virginity. Other characters hover on the borderline between transformation and disaster. Tory MP "Jims" Melcombe-Smith, in bed politically with the "family values" crowd, is simultaneously courting a gay lover. Working-class Zillah Leach, bored with her small children and smaller bank account, schemes to marry up, even at the risk of committing bigamy. This is not a whodunit in the sense of Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, but a study of crime's origins and especially its consequences as they ripple out beyond the immediate victims. The plot is intricate but brisk, and Rendell nails her characters' psychology in all its perverse logic. She has a travel writer's sensitivity to setting, to the architecture, cemeteries, birds and vegetation of contemporary Britain. This is a literary page-turner, both elegant and accessible. (Feb. 19) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.