Lady Anna Book

Softly sketched, disarmingly rendered, but a knockout.
Unassuming round-table-of-characters mystery, sifts a lot of dissimilar layers and keeps going. Part of the beauty here is watching an intentionally tipsy narrative gathering all threads toward the center and then convening for a moment, only to unravel outwards again.

Broadly disparate lives interact, confront, fracture and repair along the course of the telling here. Rendell is by now a past master of the art of shuffling character & narrative direction in alternating chapters; setting all participants reeling toward some unseen, unknowable rendezvous... With the only guarantee being that they'll all somehow interlock at some point.

Nothing lurid or bloody, all in all, more a restrained tour of an unpredictable landscape; all anchored nicely with the frame, or spine, really, of the Portobello Road and its environs.

This brings to mind Polanski at the peak of his form, or maybe classic Hitchcock; so it is cinematic, though not in scope or sweep terms but in pacing and editorial precision. And it comes across as something Rendell did in-between crossword puzzles, unassuming, unspectacular.

Character, atmosphere, timing, pace.
This is head and shoulders above anything being written in the mystery genre that I know of, and beautifully understated at that.
Five stars.