Product Description

Jock Lewis was supposed to have died in a terrible train crash at Paddington. Minty, his girlfriend, received a letter telling her so. But, curiously, the police haven’t been in touch. And Jock has borrowed all her savings.

Zillah also got a letter informing her that her husband, Jerry Leach, was dead. Something about it struck her as suspicious, but she chooses not to mention her doubts to her fiancé, an up-and-coming Conservative Member of Parliament.

Fiona, a successful banker, met Jeff Leigh before the Paddington crash. And although he never seemed to have a job, and borrowed money from her, she is utterly devoted to him -- and can’t understand why he suddenly disappeared.

As the novel progresses, it slowly becomes apparent how the lives of these women might be connected, and how they may figure into a series of vicious stabbing deaths that have shocked and terrified the citizens of London. With consummate skill, Ruth Rendell pulls the colourful strands of this harrowing story ever tighter, increasing the tension page by page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1217032 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-11
• Released on: 2003-02-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 448 pages

From Amazon.com
In Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, the mills of the gods appear to have ground Jock Lewis to dust--or have they? Jock's obsessive-compulsive girlfriend, Minty, thinks he was killed in a train crash and is tormented by his ghost. But the cheerfully amoral Jock--AKA Jerry Leach and Jeff Leigh, depending on which woman he's romancing--faked his death to move on to yet another unsuspecting lady. His one legal wife has swept their union hastily under the rug and married a conservative member of Parliament, who has his own urgent secrets. Jock's most recent fiancée, a successful banker, hasn't minded keeping him in the manner to which he's become accustomed--that is, until the day he doesn't come home. When his body is found in a cinema, the intersections of his past collapse in a way that destroys some lives and rebuilds others.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is no whodunit: the murderer is known from the outset. The suspense arises from the uncertainty of whether justice will be served. That deftly handled angle draws the reader into the book, while Ruth Rendell's famously acute insight into all forms of borderline madness makes it all so believably chilling. --Barrie Trinkle

From Publishers Weekly
HThis latest gem from the British master concerns the wreckage wrought on a variety of Londoners by a womanizing con man who speaks in rhymes. Here, as in A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999), Rendell's genius is to create characters so vivid they live beyond the frame of the novel. She pushes the ordinary to the point of the bizarre while remaining consistently believable. Araminta "Minty" Knox, the fragile center of the plot, is a 30-something woman, alone and obsessed with hygiene, who works in a dry-cleaning shop. All the world is a petri dish for Minty, who sees germs everywhere, which she attacks with Wright's Coal Tar Soap. She is equally tormented by the ghosts she imagines, her domineering "Auntie" and the man who took her virginity. Other characters hover on the borderline between transformation and disaster. Tory MP "Jims" Melcombe-Smith, in bed politically with the "family values" crowd, is simultaneously courting a gay lover. Working-class Zillah Leach, bored with her small children and smaller bank account, schemes to marry up, even at the risk of committing bigamy. This is not a whodunit in the sense of Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, but a study of crime's origins and especially its consequences as they ripple out beyond the immediate victims. The plot is intricate but brisk, and Rendell nails her characters' psychology in all its perverse logic. She has a travel writer's sensitivity to setting, to the architecture, cemeteries, birds and vegetation of contemporary Britain. This is a literary page-turner, both elegant and accessible.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
It's probably a bad idea to become so complacent about an author that the reader fails to approach each new work with a healthy dose of skepticism. But with a master like British author Rendell, it's easy to have such confidence. Once again, Rendell has concocted an assortment of damaged but compelling characters. Michelle and Matthew are a husband and wife with complementary eating disorders: one acquaintance tauntingly calls them "large and little." Then there's Minty, morbidly obsessed with cleanliness and prone to seeing the ghost of her dead aunt. Last but not least, there's Zillah, a down-on-her-luck single mother whose best friend, a rich, closeted gay member of Parliament, has just proposed a marriage of convenience. Even the supporting characters in this book are interesting enough to have spin-off plots of their own. As it is, Rendell unfolds a story in which each of these characters is unknowingly connected to the others and all the events revolve around several brutal murders in London. Combining humor with painstaking character detail, Rendell offers her readers another mesmerizing psychological mystery. Recommended for all public libraries. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.