'Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved?' The answer to this riddle is, of course, 'Pinch Me', which the riddler promptly does to produce squeals of shock from his victim.
A traditional children's riddle and all fairly innocent, except in the hands of an author such as Rendell, who makes it one of the chat-up lines of Jerry/Jeff/Jock, a serial womanizer and con artist with a variety of identities and a string of duped females behind him.
In this context it becomes a sinister and ironic motif, as most of Jerry's targets could do with somebody to pinch them and wake them up to the reality that the man is a scoundrel and deserves to come to a sticky end. He does, less than halfway through the book, but this is no simple 'whodunit?' for we know who the murderer is immediately. That is not the point of the book.
What Rendell does - and does brilliantly - is to examine the consequences of Jerry's life, as well as death, on those who have come in contact with him, either willingly or innocently. All have their weaknesses and their obsessions, and his impact on them, even if only as passing, produces a domino effect of suspicion, greed, vanity, helplessness and insanity.
Rendell has the ability to put people under a microscope and enlarge and expose all their human foibles in a way the producers of Big Brother could only dream of. Complex, fascinating and utterly gripping, this is one of Rendell's best books, and that is saying something! Review by MIKE RIPLEY (Kirkus UK)
