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Title: The Water's Lovely

Author: Ruth Rendell

Narrator: Claire Price

Format: Abridged

Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-23-09

Publisher: Random House Audiobooks

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Modern Detective

Publisher's Summary:

She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated towards her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, "Don't look!"'

The dead man was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Now, nine years on, she and her sister, Heather, still live in the same house in Clapham. But it has been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lives upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy had drowned, has disappeared.

Ismay works in public relations, and Heather in catering. They get on well. They always have. They never discuss the changes to the house, still less what happened that August day...

But even lives as private as these, where secrets hang in the air like dust, intertwine with other worlds and other individuals. And, with painful inevitability, the truth will emerge.

Members Reviews:

just miserable

One of the most dreary, boring books I've ever read. Such a sorry bunch of unpleasant characters, who all manage to emerge unscathed from their various shady doings, except for the couple of people you might actually have rooted for, if you cared enough at all. Very unsatisfying ending, especially since I had only kept reading in the hopes of some kind of redeeming resolution. Nope. Very, very weak.

Just okay for me

I found this book wanting. The characters were shallow and two- dimensional and the ending didnât make sense. I wanted to know why (spoiler alert) Ismay stayed with Andrew, why Barry married Marion, why Heather and Edmund had to die - everything was random and unexplained. Overall it felt like the author was in a hurry to get the book out and didnât put a whole lot of thought into it.

A good book but not a great Rendell

When I first started reading this book, I wondered why Ruth Rendell didn't publish this under her pseudonym Barbara Vine, which is reserved for her best and most complex psychological dramas. By the time I was done, I understood. It is an interesting read with a very complex storyline but there are a few blatant coincidences that diminish this as a superb read. The devotion of sisters, one of whom may or may not have murdered their stepfather, and the subsequent catastrophic collapse of their mother form the centerpiece of the book. If only these people could have talked to one another! Rendell unflinchingly fails to rescue her characters from disastrous relationships and yet, through her eyes, we understand why people make such awful choices (and not just romantically). I think her writing is a little uneven in recent years but she still delivers a good story. Just not a great one, in this case.

You Tell them, Ruth!

Ruth Rendell is one of my favorite British mystery writers. I have read almost all of her books which is a considerable achievement when you consider this is her sixty-fifth. Twenty of them were Inspector Wexfords. The others were mainly psychological character studies; this new one falls into that category. Remember the old dictum from writing classes: show the readers, don't tell them. Rendell constantly breaks this old chestnut adage and does it successfully.