A review by billymac1962
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell

2.0

There's a running joke between me and a friend of mine about jazz music. We'd be out at a club or jazz festival, and once the music moves into an obscure fusion phase, he'd lean over to me and say, "See, here's where the music gets too smart for me".

I had a similar feeling after finishing this novel. There were far too many characters to keep track of and I actually had to write down on a piece of paper the family tree to have any hope of continuing to read forward.
While I admire her for coming up with such a convoluted web, ultimately I found the novel a chore, with zero payoff.
Thank goodness this is not the first novel I had read by Ruth/Barbara because this one would have surely turned me off her. Amazon reviewers love this one, which is why I read it, but maybe this one was just too smart for me.