Brideshead Revisited with a kidnapped baby. ( )

I usually go to bed before midnight, but I stayed up reading this until 4:30 in the morning. The best way to describe why is that the story had momentum. However, it wasn't so much that I had a burning desire to find out who the murderer and the victims were. It was more that each page seemed to slightly change my prediction of what would happen while never giving the game away (I didn't work it out until the very end). This was done in a natural way and didn't feel manipulative.

There's not a whole lot to the characters — the exception is Adam, whose shifting feelings provided most of the momentum — and the female characters are just props. But despite this, I really enjoyed the feeling of moving through the plot. I haven't read many murder mysteries, so might try a few more in the future. ( )

And we're off to a great start! The first read of the month: behold Ruth Rendell pretending to be Barbara Vine here for some inexplicable reason. She wasn't content creating the wildly successful Adam Dalgleish series. No sir, she went one further and wrote another line of thrillers under this other name, presumably because these ones don't have the detective viewpoint but rather that of the perpetrators?

In any event, A Fatal Inversion has all the elements needed for a good autumn read. A sense of foreboding, a bunch of self-centered or clueless characters, an evocative setting, fantastic sense of time and place. Er, those elements are not particular to autumn of course, but here they provide the right bits of darkness because Ms. Vine-Rendell is the writer that she is.

Therefore we travel back to 1976. What a steamy summer that was, the author tells us, in more ways than one. A nineteen-year-old nitwit named Adam has just inherited a spectacular mansion from a dead great-uncle for unexpected reasons. This pile, named Ecalpemos by our word-loving Adam, soon becomes a hotbed for youthful tomfoolery because he gathers or invites four others into the fold. In the dreamy, sunlit expanses and treasure-laden rooms of the gracious Ecalpemos the five cavort and while away their days as privileged youth do. Only that three out of the five aren't privileged economically; in fact neither is Adam, and this fact provides part of the impetus for the whole story itself. The other part, frankly put, is insanity.

And again because we are in the hands of the skilled Ms.Rendell-Vine, the insanity in question is finely nuanced just like the general nitwittery of the others. They're a bunch of idiots, but so what? We still hang on to every word, panting to know what happens next, who was killed, why they were killed; we sit on the couch shunning Netflix until our eyes droop and we are good for nothing.

Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie lead us through that doomed summer, appearing as fully-fleshed characters in their youth and also ten years later. Ten years on from that summer, you see, two bodies have been found buried in the pet cemetary at Ecalpemos. Naturally the Sinful Five had plenty to do with all that. In the end there is a kind of obviousness that is nevertheless sly and breathtaking, while other elements are taken care of with a dry and tidy hand that leaves no room for doubt.

Thank you, Barbara-Ruth! I am now fully invested in charging forward with this month's stack which I procured through a wild session of ordering from the library. (It's such a downer when the first read of the month is a flop.) Now if only all those writers would play along and deliver just like this one did, all will be well and I will be a happy goat until the 1st of November. ( )

So much description painfully filled the pages of this murder that starts with what has happened but take a very long time to explain why. I'm not sure I understood the last couple of pages... ( )

I’m glad this was listed as I couldn’t remember the name! Thank you! Great creepy story, reminded me of Tana French’s The Likeness as well as the decadent 70s portion of Kate Atkinson’s sequel to Life After Life, the name of which Is also gone. ( )