A Judgement In Stone - a chilling and captivatingly unsettling thriller from the award-winning Queen of Crime, Ruth Rendell (Paperback, Reissue)

"Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." That is the first line and the boiling center of this thoroughly frightening domestic nightmare, an English In Cold Blood that relentlessly - occasionally a bit overmelodramatically - counts the days until stony-faced housekeeper Eunice and her friend Joan Smith, religious fanatic and reformed prostitute, murder the upper-middle-class Coverdales, a Mozart-listening family of kindly "interferers." Every turn of the plot, including the capture of the almost-undetected murderess, is linked to Eunice's secret illiteracy - her constant fear of discovery, her morbid fear of books ("small flattish boxes, packed with mystery and threat"), her exaggerated suspicions of her employers, her surrender to the narcotic of television. Rendell may seem to oversimplify Eunice's warped psyche ("Illiteracy had dried up her sympathy and atrophied her imagination"), but rarely has a fictional crime of madness been designed to snowball with such haphazard inevitability and terrifying ordinariness. The reigning chronicler of crime-from-the-criminal-point-of-view has struck again, with somewhat less elegance than usual but with more sheer clout: weak of heart, beware. (Kirkus Reviews)

Four members of the Coverdale family died in the space of 15 minutes on St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman, the housekeeper, shot them down on that Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television, and was arrested two weeks later. But the tragedy neither began nor ended there.

General

Imprint:	Arrow Books Ltd
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	April 1994
Authors:	Ruth Rendell
Dimensions:	178 x 120 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Mass Market
Pages:	218
Edition:	Reissue
ISBN-13:	978-0-09-917140-9
Categories:	Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > Crime & mystery > General
LSN:	0-09-917140-6
Barcode:	9780099171409

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