BLOOD LINES
Long and Short Stories
by Ruth Rendell
The keynote in the shorter entries here—some only a few pages long—is a frantic extroversion as the author eyes several disintegrating marriages and imagines her way into the minds of a compulsive shopper, a professional house-sitter, an unusually patient poisoner, and Dickens's Miss Havisham (there's also an oddly perfunctory Browning pastiche). The title story, a satisfyingly nuanced Wexford whodunit already familiar from anthologies, and "The Strawberry Tree," an extended sketch for a Barbara Vine novel, are the most substantial entries, but the best is the macabre "In All Honesty"—a tale that destroys four lives with the cheerful efficiency of an office receptionist. All told, these 11 stories remind you that the indefatigable Rendell is the most versatile, as well as the most penetrating, of contemporary suspense writers.