Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100924 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Binding: Paperback

The New York Times Book Review
Rendell is a diabolically subtle writer

About the Author
Ruth Rendell has written over 50 bestselling novels and has won many awards in the course of her career. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a Life Peer. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Who did it and what did they do?
I believe Ruth Rendell is at her best when she enters the psychological world of her characters especially the murderer and the victims. There are two bridesmaids in this novel one a marble statue called Flora and the other a flesh and blood character called Senta. These two seem to dominate the mind of Philip, a young man who has a phobia about all things violent. This we learn on the first page of this book when there is a news item on television of a young woman missing and her death seems to be assumed. You have to be in the mood for this type of tale but the rewards are great as long as you aren't too squeamish.

Breath-takingly good!
I first read this about 10 years ago when I found a copy going for a few pence in a charity shop, and I was glued to its pages throughout. I've read it again very recently, and I was even more impressed on this second reading. This is Ruth Rendell at her very, VERY best, and believe me, that's unbeatable! Philip Wardman is a decent, but somewhat priggish young man, afraid of violence in any form, and who gets ridiculously upset when he finds out that his widowed mother is sleeping with her boyfriend. At his sister's wedding he meets one of her bridesmaids, Senta Pelham, a beautiful, unusual young woman, who to say the least, is a tad eccentric.

Over the course of a long hot summer Philip becomes more and more obsessed with Senta, who has a habit of coming out with things like "our first evening together should be sacred", and claiming he is the soul-mate she has been looking for since the dawn of time, normally the sort of thing which would have most young men heading for the hills at a rate of knots! Then Senta decrees that to prove their love for one another, they should each commit murder. It is clear to anyone, even Philip, that Senta isn't quite the full picnic, but he is too smitten and obsessed to back off. There are more twists and turns in this than a corkscrew, and the ending is quite horrifying and gruesome to say the least.

I sometimes feel that no one today writes about London so evocatively as Ruth Rendell, and in "The Bridesmaid" we get some startlingly good moments of surrealism. The decaying old house in Kilburn in which Senta lives in a room in the basement seems almost to have a life of its own, and is downright spooky at times. I can't begin to describe just how Atmospheric some of these scenes are, you won't shake them off easily afterwards. I would love to see this one filmed, but not in some ITV1 9pm sanitised "Midsomer Murders"-style effort, PROPERLY filmed, by an imaginative director. If you want to read only one Ruth Rendell, to see what all the fuss is about, then make it this one!

Superb: lyrical, gripping and alluring.
Set in the seedy backwaters of London suburbia, Rendell draws you into a labyrinth - just as the main character is drawn into erotic but murderous complicity by the bridesmaid of the title in her dark house in Kilburn.

Much the best Rendell I've ever read, it successfully creates its own world into which the reader wanders like a fly into a spider's parlour: before you know it, you're hooked.