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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
exquisite stuff from Rendell,
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Face of Trespass,the (Mass Market Paperback)
Two years ago Gray Lanceton was a promising writer with one successful novel under his belt. But, then he met Drusilla, a bored, rich, unstable yet magnetic young woman, and his life was changed forever. Now he lives in quiet exile in a small messy cottage, with only the surrounding trees and his own obsessive destroying thoughts for company. Their affair is now over, and he hopes that maybe now he can be free. But, unbeknownst to Gray, tragedy lurks still above him, the shadow of Drusilla and her violent desires will soon threaten to rob him of any of that freedom he thought he had clawed back... This short book is a little piece of genius. It is a great great shame that many of these early novels of hers remain out of print, because they really are excellent. This one in particular is a wonderful yet chilling character study, which is what several of them tend to be, their lengths being what they are. While her later books are longer and can probe the psychological depths of many characters with greater ease, these early short gems tend to focus their intense insight on one major character, and she manages with effortless ease to present a completely whole, completely real, somewhat disturbing, portrait of a single fascinating character, in this case the reclusive, eerily human writer Graham Lanceton, who is actually quite likeable, which is rare for Rendell. It is a tale of desire, violence, freedom and of obsession, with each element explored wonderfully within a riveting plot. She has a wonderfully polished writing style, and creates a tale that is both claustrophobic and atmospheric. All the aspects of the plot click together wonderfully. No event is superfluous, every occurrence has its purpose and its effect, which creates a wonderful whole and round effect to the book. Book with stories that weave and interlock so well are a joy, they are more fulfilling and the effect makes the writer seem darn clever, and this is a prime. The Face of Trespass is dark, compelling, and psychologically brilliant. The final cataclysmic events are shocking and yet sensible. In fiction, this is becoming very rare.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Rendell Classic,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Face Of Trespass (Kindle Edition)
Finally, this early Rendell masterpiece is available on Kindle! This short novel is classic Rendell: beautifully plotted, engrossing, written in Rendell's hallmark style that one can recognize among hundreds of authors. Rendell is adept at creating nueanced and complex characters her readers are not likely to forget for years to come.
In THE FACE OF TRESPASS, she takes us deep into the mind of a man obsessed with the loss of a woman he loves. Almost the entire first half of the book Graham stays in an abandoned hovel in a tiny village, speaking with no one and seeing no one. Still, every page of his story is fascinating. There is very little action here, and definitely no car chases, gory details of murders, dismembered victims, and order things today's authors love to pile up in order to attract their readers. Rendell's talent is such that she doesn't need these gimmicks to make her novels impossible to put down. She offers an unrivalled psychological insight into the personality of her main character. The seemingly benign setting of her novel conceals a dreadful sense of impending disaster. In short, this is a great novel that can be read and re-read as many times as one wishes and still remain enjoyable.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A shamefully underexposed thriller,
By RolloTomasi (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The face of trespass (Hardcover)
THE FACE OF TREPASS falls into that category of early Rendell classics that have since fallen out of print. A pity--this is one of Rendell's most enjoyable, involving, and finely tuned performances. An author, obsessed by his memories of a passionate but dangerous love affair, shuts himself up in a filthy hovel for months and months, willing himself to forget...it's a wonderful setup for Rendell's typically inventive plot twists, peppered with dead-on psychological insight.Rendell's boundless strengths as a mystery writer and an anatomist of the human condition are fully in evidence here. She demonstrates once more her perfect mastery of tone and pace, as well as her gift for wicked wit--THE FACE OF TRESPASS is not just a superior thriller; it can also be an extremely funny book in certain places. And like all of the author's novels, there is a wonderfully effective buildup of psychological tension, a sense of inevitable tragedy that is brilliantly sustained--impressive, considering that THE FACE OF TRESPASS doesn't feature a single gunfight or car chase. Nothing here but delicious prose, shrewd social observation, marvelous character study, and a deft plot that serves up surprise after surprise. The story is marred only by a contrived conclusion that offers a false sense of security, usually absent in Rendell's bleak novels. Still, a wonderfully rich choice for fans of intelligent suspense fiction.
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