Customer Reviews

Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Inspector Wexford Mysteries)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chief Inspector Wexford, protagonist in many Rendell books, investigates the shooting death, in an apparent robbery, of a well-known writer in her home, along with most of her family. The only survivor and eyewitness is the teenage granddaughter, Daisy, wounded and depressed. As the police investigate, a number of suspicious characters complicate the process; while Wexford's own strained relations with his daughter Sheila make Daisy's plight more poignant.

This longish mystery, with well-drawn characters, plenty of red herrings and several social classes, is enjoyable until the end. The book comes to a rapid conclusion, as Wexford uncovers the truth in a burst of insight and detection, while short-changing evidence gathering.

--inotherworlds.com

This is a long novel, and while lengthiness isn't at all a bad quality, Ruth Rendell has proven repeatedly that her tight, densely structured mysteries function best in shorter, more compact versions. Contrast "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter," a massive 380-page novel with earlier Wexfords like "Shake Hands Forever" and "Death Notes," and it's clear why.

While certainly above and beyond the average murder mystery, "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter" is a seriously overblown effort, a novel that progresses slowly for the first three quarters and then moves dizzyingly fast in the final quarter. It's hard for the reader to catch interest in the beginning, and even harder to keep track of many of the plot complexities that emerge toward the end. As opposed to her earlier works, stinging little gems that didn't waste a single word, this book is filled with enough descriptions of foliage to turn off a horticulturist.

Ruth Rendell is often compared with P.D. James. Both are superior crime novelists. For ingenious plotting and dazzling surprise twists, Rendell definitely outdoes James. But for a longer, more literate read, P.D. James is still the master.

"The thirteenth of May is the unluckiest day of the year. Things will be infinitely worse if it happens to fall on a Friday. That year, however, it was a Monday and quite bad enough....in the morning he ( Sergeant Martin of Kingsmarkham CID) had found a gun in the case his son took to school." And it was also to be Sergeant Martin's last day on earth!

In this absolute thriller by Ruth Rendell, the author begins "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter," and she doesn't let go of the suspense until the book is finished. A longtime fan of Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford series, I believe this is my favorite, and I've read them all. Rendell, often called the "Queen of Crime" by the Brits (in fairness, so has P.D. James and Ellis Peters--it depends on which publisher you're reading, I suppose!) presents her lovable Wexford and assistant Mike Burden out to solve another crime in Kingsmarkham.

Police are called when three bodies are discovered shot at Tancred House; only the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the victims survives; it is from her that the police get their initial clues. As the story develops, of course, not all the clues are what they seem. Wexford is at his best and as the list of suspects continues to grow, it is his remarkable powers of deduction and intuition that prevail.

Along the way, the chief inspector must struggle with a rift he has recently had with his daughter Sheila--this affects his abilities to see clearly, too.

The "Sunday Times" writes that "Ruth Rendell has quite simply transformed the genre of crime writing. She deploys her peerless skills in blending the mundane, commonplace aspects of life with the potent, murky impulses of desire and greed, obsession and fear." In "Kissing the Gunner's Daughter" she holds the reader spellbound to its explosive end. It is a novel that begins and ends not with a whimper but with a bang!

Billyjhobbs@tyler.net

A great story; good to the last word in the book.

This is her BEST Inspector Wexford, but if you spent your childhood reading Agatha Christie (as I did), one of the guilty parties will leap out at you as soon as you read the book jacket copy.

I read this book in college for a Detective Fiction course and I loved it. I liked this book so much I went on to read about half a dozen other novels that Ruth Rendell has written about Reginald Wexford. This book isn't so much a mysterious whodunnit as it is about the private life of the detective, Reginald Wexford. It is pretty easy to figure out who commited the murders at the beginning of the book, but Wexford's reasoning is clouded somewhat by his personal life and his relationship with his younger daughter Sheila. If you aren't interested in reading a novel that is mostly social commentary, as most of the Wexford novels are, and are more into a murder mysteries that are hard to figure out, then this may not be the novel for you. If you are interested in reading about social trends that are current, and are written in an interesting fashion, I strongly recommmend this book.

This is a well-plotted, fascinating book. Rendell handles numerous characters and sub-plots with ease. Somehow she ties it all together at the end. Her descriptions of the English countryside are beautifully phrased. This is one of my favorites. The last page is truly chilling to imagine. Buy this book!

Readers new to Ruth Rendell will not likely mind the length, but many of us miss the usual clear cut and to the point style of her earlier works. I will mention that her novels under the Barbara Vine psuedonym are a different story altogether. Those books are lengthy because of the nature of the material in those books. Still this is an engrossing mystery and with a suitably unexpected solution at the end.

This is a well-plotted, fascinating book. Rendell handles numerous characters and sub-plots with ease. Somehow she ties it all together at the end, although a few of the coincidences are beyond belief. Her descriptions of the English countryside are beautifully phrased. This is one of my favorites. The last page is truly chilling to imagine. Buy this book!

Allow me to begin with a fatuous little complaint: The cover art on my paperback edition created the impression among peers that I was reading a romance novel. As a 20something heterosexual male, I found this rather annoying. A good mystery novel should not embarrass the reader!

Cover art aside, I found Gunner's Daughter less enjoyable than I expected. Ms Rendell is a competent writer and has woven a fair number of plot threads together, but the work as a whole was somewhat unsatisfying. It was, I told others when describing the book, as if a romance novelist had written a murder mystery without changing her style. Too many paragraphs are devoted to things which I would just as soon have left out; I understand the desire to portray full and multifaceted characters, but could the protagonist please spend less time agonizing over his prospective son-in-law, for instance? The plot dragged needlessly at times, and in these instances I fell back on pure determination to see the story through rather than intense personal interest in the characters or the writing. Reading shouldn't be like that.

Please do not get me wrong- I do not devote my reading hours purely to Travis McGee or Honor Harrington, and when this book was over I was fairly satisfied that my time had been well spent. I simply feel compelled to caution prospective readers who might otherwise be expecting excitement, suspense, or any of the other trappings of a mystery novel.