And they all lived weirdly ever after

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Minty Knox has a personality disorder: she's obsessive about cleanliness, incessantly bathing and washing her clothes. When she receives a letter telling her that her boyfriend Jock - whom she's not seen since he borrowed all her savings - has been killed in the Paddington train crash, she moves further towards dementia. His ghost manifests itself in her sitting room, and she hears her dead aunt and Jock's mother discussing, and disapproving of, her housekeeping methods.

Zillah Leach receives a similar letter about her husband Jerry, who abandoned her years ago. She, less credulous, is unmoved by the news, but seizes the opportunity to marry a rich Tory MP who needs a wife to dispel rumours about his sexual predilections. Meanwhile, Fiona, a banker with a large salary and a valuable house, is looking forward to marriage to Jeff, whom she's happy to support until his ship comes home. Ruth Rendell makes no mystery out of the fact that these three con artists, who all love Polo mints and tell childish jokes, are the same man.

We're just settling down to something akin to a Patricia Highsmith Ripley story, when the narrative, confounding all our expectations, performs a spectacular somersault and sets off in new direction as the lives of Minty, Zillah and Fiona collapse around their ears.

No one recreates the minutiae of life better than Ruth Rendell: an anorexic's diet (lettuce leaf, 12 dry-roasted peanuts, slice hard-boiled egg with powdered Parmesan, piece of Ryvita), or Minty's depressing pursuit of ultimate cleanliness, consuming industrial quantities of soap, washing powder and carbon tetrachloride.

But there's a certain lack of conviction when dealing with the larger worlds of politics, journalism, or police procedure. Not, in fact, that this is important here, for the novel's pervading air of gloom is deceptive: this is a comedy - and, when we're listening to Minty's voices or watching Zillah cope with the Press, a very amusing one, with a happy ending for the majority of the characters.