A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

3.68 AVERAGE

lucyb's review against another edition

5.0
Even by Rendell's own exalted standards, this is brilliant. Allusive, humane, tender and savage by turns, it is a spare, unsparing look at the ways that humans construct meaning, and what happens when our ways of understanding the world fail. It's both absolutely chilling and -- at times -- darkly funny, as it charts the interactions of a stubbornly illiterate, cunning housekeeper, and a family whose own world, textured though it is with the texts and foods and music of half-a-dozen civilizations, can be dangerously insular.