THE BRIDESMAID IN SOUTH AFRICA

Philip is a young man who lives with his widowed mother and two sisters in North London in 'reduced circumstances' since his father died. He's about to start his first job, and his girlfriend wants to marry and 'settle down'. but he starts to resist the life he can see mapped out. Like all Rendell novels, the story is set in a very recognisable world populated with everyday folk, but nothing is ever quite as it seems and the book takes on an increasingly claustrophobic and nightmarish quality as it goes along. Seemingly innocent and thoughtless gestures precipitate a relentless chain of events which the author depicts with painstaking, relentless inevitability. A young girl who was a contemporary of Philip's sister disappears, presumed dead, and this event brings on Philip's strange repulsion of violence, annexing him from his family. His ability to hide his thoughts makes him a very unreliable narrator, It's not an Inspector Wexford or a whodunnit as such, but it has an uneasy, claustrophobic atmosphere all of its own.