The Water's Lovely

by: Ruth Rendell

Published by: Vintage Crime

Reviewed by Caryn St. Clair

The Water’s Lovely is written under Rendell’s own name though it is much more characteristic of the books she writes as Barbara Vine. This dark psychological tale revolves around two sisters, their nearly insane mother, her sister and two murders committed several years apart.

The creepiness of the book starts immediately. As the story opens, Heather and Ismay Sealand are moving into the first floor flat of their mother’s house. Their mother and her sister/caretaker live upstairs. But there have been more modifications made to the house than just dividing it into two flats. A bathroom where the girls’ step dad drowned has been sealed off. Though ruled an accident, everyone in the family assumes Heather helped Guy to his death. Now two men are entering the Sealand girls’ lives, and Ismay is worried. Plagued for years with the reoccurring dream of Guy’s face beneath the water, the dream suddenly has changed and it’s the face of her new boyfriend, Andrew, in the bathtub. And then Heather, who has never really had a serious boyfriend before, becomes involved with Edmond Litton. Should he be told about what Guy’s death and the family’s suspicions?

There are a few problems with this book that keep it from being one of Rendell’s best. She doesn’t quite play fair with the reader in that a least one major plot turn hinges on a highly unlikely occurrence. After setting the stage early on in the book for a complex story of a deeply disturbed family, the whole thing sort of falls apart as the book progresses. The solutions to too many things seem to just happen by coincidence, the reader is left hanging on some of the developing relationships, and although the characters ‘gripped me in the beginning, by the midpoint I found that I didn’t really care much about any of them. I hadn’t gotten to know them well enough to care.

Even taking these shortcomings into account, this is after all a Rendell book and even Rendell at less than her best is still far above most others in the genre.

Armchair Interviews says: Several shortcomings affect a good book that could have been a great read.