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yetilibrary 's review for:
Sins of the Fathers: An Inspector Wexford Mystery
by Ruth Rendell
According to my INFALLIBLE GoodReads records, I actually read this in 2008 first. In the last 8 years I forgot all about it and reread it and remembered nothing about the plot, so GO ME! Also I seem to like it better now than I did then.
A strength of a Rendell novel is that the characters are so real, so well-sketched, that none of them is 100% likeable. That is the case here. (By the same token, it's unusual for a character to be completely UNlikeable... but it happens.) A weakness of some Rendell novels, however, is their age: some rely heavily on social taboos that have lost a lot of their power in the last several decades, and that is the case here (Sins of the Fathers is from 1967). As a thirtysomething in 2016, it's hard for me to FULLY appreciate the cold, hard terror that people from that time felt about having their social transgressions discovered, and it's a stumbling block to me as a reader.
That said, as usual I never fully anticipated where Rendell was going, and the book was tightly-written and well-plotted. I enjoyed it a lot!
A strength of a Rendell novel is that the characters are so real, so well-sketched, that none of them is 100% likeable. That is the case here. (By the same token, it's unusual for a character to be completely UNlikeable... but it happens.) A weakness of some Rendell novels, however, is their age: some rely heavily on social taboos that have lost a lot of their power in the last several decades, and that is the case here (Sins of the Fathers is from 1967). As a thirtysomething in 2016, it's hard for me to FULLY appreciate the cold, hard terror that people from that time felt about having their social transgressions discovered, and it's a stumbling block to me as a reader.
That said, as usual I never fully anticipated where Rendell was going, and the book was tightly-written and well-plotted. I enjoyed it a lot!