The late Ruth Rendell’s final novel is built on that most unnerving of things: catastrophe brought about not by premeditated evil but by a momentary moral failure that gets repeatedly compounded. Carl is in the early stages of a career as a novelist and feeling the pinch as he writes the follow-up to his debut, Death’s Door. Easy money, then, to sell some mysterious diet pills left lying around his house to his best friend, Stacey. When tragedy strikes (predictably enough for us, if not Carl), Carl’s lodger, creepy Dermot from the pet clinic, seizes the perfect opportunity for blackmail. But while the plot drives one forward, it’s the incidental detail that captivates: shabby-genteel Maida Vale, a bus-fixated retiree and snippets of sly humour. Here’s one of my favourite characters, Lizzie Milsom, making a devastating discovery: “She didn’t scream. Privately, she believed that women who screamed when they found a dead body only did it for effect.”
Dark Corners is published by Hutchinson (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.19
