Adam and Eve and Pinch Me - Softcover

Rendell, Ruth

3.66

2,732 ratings by Goodreads

9780770428983: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0770428983 ISBN 13: 9780770428983

Publisher: Seal Books, 2003

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'Ghosts in stories are grey, like the people in black-and-white television or else see-through, but this one had short dark hair and a brown neck and a black leather jacket. Minty didn't have to see its face to know it was her late fiance, Jock.' Jock was supposed to have died in the Paddington train crash. Minty had received a letter from the railway company. But, curiously, the police hadn't been in touch. And Jock had gone off with all her savings. Then there was Zilla Leach. She had been married to a man called Jerry. She's also received a letter from Great Western that her husband was dead. She didn't really believe the story, but chose not to mention her doubts to James Melcombe-Smith, an up-and-coming Conservative MP, who was proposing a marriage of convenience...Fiona was a successful banker. Jeff Leigh had appeared on the scene before that terrible rail crash in October. Although he borrowed money from her and never seemed to be in work, she loved him. Jock's ghost reappeared to Minty at home, at work, even in the cinema. He even touched her. Minty started to carry a knife. If he wasn't made of shadows, would he bleed?

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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 fianc�e, 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 Back Cover:

“Another exemplary product of Rendell’s fertile imagination. Delivers what mystery lovers want. Above all, fascination.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Rendell builds plots the way the Romans built bridges, erecting graceful, arching affairs that soar high because they are sunk deep and cost a human life or two.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A neat little microcosm of the Rendell universe, in which innocence and experience, the macabre and playful, the sadistic and romantic, all rub shoulders . . . before erupting into a kind of spontaneously lethal combustion.” –The Boston Globe

“Disquieting, compelling . . . Rendell is a literary Hitchcock, coming at stories from unexpected angles.” –Chicago Tribune

“Rendell terrorizes with the subtle authority of a cat burglar in the night.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Whether she’s writing as herself or under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, Rendell is never boring. Adam and Eve is no exception.” –USA Today

“A true page-turner, with a haunting ending that stayed with me long after I had read the final sentences.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“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.” –Publishers Weekly

“Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.” –Los Angeles Times

“Madly absorbing . . . Rendell’s characters are fully drawn, and we become completely caught up in their struggles.” –Booklist

“Ruth Rendell is, unequivocally, the most brilliant mystery novelist of our times.” –Patricia Cornwell

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