Adam and Eve and Pinch Me: A Novel - Softcover

Rendell, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099426196 ISBN 13: 9780099426196

Publisher: Crown Publishers, 2002

Synopsis

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe; Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved?' This old nursery rhyme is a favourite of Jerry Leach (if that is the name he is using at the time), a handsome ne'er do well, who sponges off women. Five women, unknown to each other, are his willing victims. One he even married once and abandoned, while promising to marry another. But, with the cruel irony he would be the first to recognize in that nursery rhyme, Jerry, almost accidentally, becomes the victim of one of his female prey.

About this title

Review:

In Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, the mills of the gods appear to have ground Jock Lewis to dust--or have they? Jock's obsessive-compulsive girlfriend, Minty, thinks he was killed in a train crash and is tormented by his ghost. But the cheerfully amoral Jock--AKA Jerry Leach and Jeff Leigh, depending on which woman he's romancing--faked his death to move on to yet another unsuspecting lady. His one legal wife has swept their union hastily under the rug and married a conservative member of Parliament, who has his own urgent secrets. Jock's most recent fiancée, a successful banker, hasn't minded keeping him in the manner to which he's become accustomed--that is, until the day he doesn't come home. When his body is found in a cinema, the intersections of his past collapse in a way that destroys some lives and rebuilds others.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is no whodunit: the murderer is known from the outset. The suspense arises from the uncertainty of whether justice will be served. That deftly handled angle draws the reader into the book, while Ruth Rendell's famously acute insight into all forms of borderline madness makes it all so believably chilling. --Barrie Trinkle

From the Inside Flap:

Jock Lewis was supposed to have died in that terrible train crash at Paddington. Minty, his girlfriend, received a letter from Great Western telling her so. But, curiously, the police haven?t been in touch. And Jock has borrowed all her savings . . .

Zillah also got a letter from the railway company, informing her that her husband, Jerry Leach, was dead. Something about the letter struck her as suspicious, but she chooses not to mention her doubts to the up-and-coming Conservative Member of Parliament who has just proposed a marriage of convenience . . .

Fiona, a successful banker, met Jeff Leigh before the Paddington crash in August. Although he never seemed to have a job, and borrowed money from her, she is utterly devoted to him?and can?t understand why he suddenly has disappeared . . .

As this novel gets under way, it is not immediately apparent how the lives of these women might be connected, or how they may figure into a series of vicious stabbing deaths that have shocked and terrified the citizens of London. With consummate skill, Ruth Rendell pulls the colorful strands of this harrowing story ever tighter, increasing the tension page by page.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Publishers
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099426196
• ISBN 13: 9780099426196
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448