Ruth Rendell is not for the faint of heart. She is certainly capable of building her readers’ sense of dread, and I felt one from the beginning of The Water’s Lovely, to the point where I almost couldn’t enjoy it.
Ismay suspects that her sister Heather drowned their stepfather Guy in the bathtub years ago to save Ismay from his advances. She and their mother assumed Heather’s guilt at the time but never spoke of it, and their mother is now mentally ill. When Heather gets seriously involved with a coworker, Edmund, Ismay begins to worry that she should tell him what Heather did. She stupidly records her theory on a cassette tape.
Rendell does a great job of portraying a slew of repellent characters, including self-obsessed Ismay; Edmund’s clinging, whiny mother; and Ismay’s selfish, manipulative boyfriend Andrew. The worst is Marion, the woman Edmond’s mother would like him to date. She likes to befriend elderly people she thinks will put her in their wills, and then she perhaps poisons them.
I worried what was going to happen with that tape, because Heather and Edmund were practically the only likeable characters in the book, except for the girl’s aunt Pamela and her friend Michael. Happily, the ending wasn’t as dreadful as I feared.
What? Me Read? 