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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine,
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This review is from: Three Novels: "Dark-adapted Eye", "Fatal Inversion" and "House of Stairs" (Paperback)
A Dark Adapted Eye: Rendell's first "Barbara Vine" novel. In just a few pages she establishes a dark Victorian gothic atmosphere and reveals that Vera either is or is not guilty of murder but has been executed for it. An excellent beginning. The tone is ominous and there is a LOT of foreshadowing of murder being done. Relationships among characters are revealed only slowly, like the peeling of an onion, layer after layer; or like approaching a family tree backwards, starting with the outer limbs and working inward toward the trunk. Some of the relations between characters are downright startling. The downside of this is that one gets lost in the geneology at times. I have now finished this novel and can say all of the relationships come to fruition in the end, and it is answered whether Vera was or was not a murderer. However, Vine leaves one major storyline open to interpretation, a mystery forever.
A Fatal Inversion: The first scene in this second novel features the death and burial of a pet beagle. I lost my own beagle last year so this story already makes me emotional. Back to the story though. While burying the beagle, the remains of a human are discovered. The story features 5 people, told in each person's point of view, about what happened ten years ago when they all lived together; they share some mysterious dark secret that has to do with the human remains that were discovered. No one weaves the past with the present like Barbara Vine. The human remains are of a young woman and a baby. Without giving the ending completely away, the body in the grave is not the one you were led to believe. And I had to read the anticlimax twice before I understood the ending. All in all, a brilliant novel. The House of Stairs: The house of stairs is a five story house in 1960's London. The people who live there come and go; it's like a hippie/commune. As in the first two Vine novels you know from the outset that there will be a murder but the culprit and the victim will remain unknown until near the end. And this is my favorite novel of all time because it's not just a grand con job, but it's a grand con job gone very wrong. Absolutely stunning, brilliant
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
review,
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This review is from: Three Novels: "Dark-adapted Eye", "Fatal Inversion" and "House of Stairs" (Paperback)
good reading but a little too much superfluous detail....many if not most novels suffer from the same thing
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