The Rottweiler: A Novel - Hardcover

Rendell, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400051908 ISBN 13: 9781400051908

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2004

Synopsis

A serial killer known as the "Rottweiler" stalks the young women of an ethnically diverse London neighborhood near Lisson Grove, and the only clue lies in the trinkets taken by the killer from each victim as a macabre souvenir, items that start to turn up amid the clutter of a local antique shop. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

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 fiancées. 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:

'... proving again that, in the world of contemporary crime fiction, Rendall really is top dog.' -- Sunday Times (Culture) 5th October 2003

'Rendell skilfully crafts her characters and they breathe feverishly through her imagination.' -- The Times 27th September 2003

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400051908
• ISBN 13: 9781400051908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 339