A Fatal Inversion

Does anyone do "creepy" as well as British writers? They invented the murder mystery, right? Even tea-sipping spinsters are in on it. In fact, when you think about it, doesn't "Creepy Macabre" sound like someone you wouldn't want to meet at boarding school?

Am knee deep in A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell posing as Barbara Vine (creepily enough, she dedicates this book "with love from Barbara" -- as though this Barbara person were, like, real) and thus far we know a woman and a baby are dead, we know that some sexually active but not perhaps active enough (we have the requisite Rendell inhibited character here, too) young people are spending stolen time in a glorious country house one of them has inherited but can't afford to keep, and we have a sort of Secret History knowledge that yes, the group knows and must keep secret that something sinister and bad (well, murder) occured in the house for some reason yet to be revealed.

There is a beautiful tension to all this, as we wait with bated breath to learn who this poor dead woman is and why she came to such a fate. We know that the inheritor of the country house went on to good things, and the most overtly sexual of the houseguests is a doctor who has taken his interest to the specialty level, being an ob-gyn who is deciding if it is time to move to Highgate from Hamstead. References also to Muswell Hill and other places that are for me shots to the heart which is why we SWORE, vainly, not to read any books set in London or England or the UK.

Be that as it may. Vine/Rendell is wonderful at depicting the shallow soul, propelled by a deviant self-interest, moving inexorably toward a final act of departure, such as murder. Which of these idle young people ends up dead and who the killer? So far any of them could go without much of a loss to humanity; we know the boys are safe from the dead part, though the baby may implicate one in the death.

Cannot wait for nightfall and another dose of Sinister Macabre.