The Rottweiler - Hardcover

Rendell, Ruth

3.41

2,565 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385660251 ISBN 13: 9780385660259

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2003

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A series of apparently motiveless murders disrupts the lives of some very different people in Rendell’s darkly atmospheric London.

The first victim was discovered with a bite on her neck. The police traced the DNA to the girl’s boyfriend, but the tabloids had already dubbed the murderer “The Rottweiler,” and the name stuck. The latest body was found near Inez Ferry’s shop in Marylebone. Someone spotted a figure fleeing into the shadows, but couldn’t say even if it was man or woman. The only other clues are the murderer’s penchant for strangling his prey, and for then removing a small token -- a necklace, a lighter.

To make ends meet, widowed Inez Ferry takes in tenants above her antique store. The unpredictable and obsessive acts of the serial murderer begin profoundly to disturb the lives of the heterogeneous little community of lodgers, especially when suspicion grows that one of them might be “The Rottweiler.”

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Review:

Ruth Rendell's The Rottweiler centres on a small group of Londoners, one of whom is, as it happens, a serial killer. There is never any particular mystery to the omniscient narrator, or the reader listening to her, as to who the killer is--the questions at stake are: who is going to fall under suspicion, whether the killer will be caught and why on earth the killer has this periodic urge to garotte a variety of women and steal an item of jewellery from them.

We spend a lot of time with some interesting flawed people--Inez, the widow obsessed with her late actor husband, in whose junk shop the killer occasionally dumps clues; Will, the beautiful stupid boy whose aunt is torn about the prospect of a life spent looking after him; Zeinab, the young woman who may or may not have a violently jealous father and certainly has too many fianc�es. We see these people through their own indulgent eyes and through the more jaundiced, but hardly more accurate eyes of killer and investigating police--Rendell is intelligent about self-deception and inner lives and the way we construct parts of our own identity through self-interested disapproval of others. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Ruth Rendell has written some of the best novels of the twentieth century."--Frances Fyfield "Rendell's clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.""--The New Yorker "From the Paperback edition.

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