The Water's Lovely

The Water's Lovely - Ruth Rendell These days my sole criterion for a good book is whether it can draw me in enough that I don't notice the names of the subway stops on my long commute. This one passed the test. The "big reveal" was nothing special - I had it as my primary hypothesis before the half-way mark of the book. And I was uneasy about the ending, which seemed to me way over the top, although it did have the air of being an almost snarky and ironic comment about mystery readers' desire for poetic justice (the guilty must not go unpunished, and the more symbolic the punishment the better). My main complaint was the sheer unloveliness of the characters; one spends a great deal of time being dismayed and disgusted by them. Perhaps I look for a rather more escapist view of human nature in my mysteries. Nonetheless, I rarely noticed those subway stops.