Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400031184 ISBN 13: 9781400031184

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2003

Minty’s boyfriend, Jock, was killed in the disastrous train wreck at Paddington, shortly after he borrowed all her savings. Now he has come back to haunt her. Zillah lost her estranged husband, Jerry, in that same accident. She is not convinced he is actually dead, but for reasons of her own decides not to pursue the matter. Fiona’s fiancé, Jeff, has simply disappeared–quite inexplicably since she was supporting him in style.

In her ingeniously unnerving new novel, Ruth Rendell deftly traces the connections among these women–and between them a series of vicious stabbings terrifying London. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is a masterpiece of malice and psychological suspense.

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 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