An enjoyable little mystery with a few unexpected twists and turns. ( )

Gerald Candless is a popular novelist, with a "perfect" life----lovely wife, two beautiful adoring adult daughters. But there's some darkness in all of his books, and he insists that he uses everything that happens to him in his fiction in some way. When he dies suddenly, one of his daughters begins researching his family history in preparation for writing her own memoir of Life with Daddy. Except that there doesn't seem to be any history past a certain point, or any family at all. Where did he come from, and why did he change his name? Mother is no help, and has zero interest in the project.(Could it be she's just relieved to be able to drop the Happy Marriage charade?) This is a page turner, with just enough hints to fuel the reader's suspicions about the solution to the mystery. Gerald's daughters don't know what to do with the information that turns up; neither does his publisher, who ends up with two manuscripts in his hands that could explode Gerald's reputation, one from his daughter, and one from the man himself.
August 2020 ( )

This was an interesting book about a woman who realized that her late father was not the one he pretended to be. She made inquiries and found that her father took on the identity of a deceased person. During her search, she not only found a new family but also the secret of her father, who had written much of it in his books without anyone noticing. She plunged into different worlds, including the homosexual scene.
I liked the book well. ( )

After the sudden death of the well-known author Gerald Candless, his elder daughter is persuaded to write a biography of her beloved father. When she uncovers amid her researches that her father was not who he had claimed to be, that he wasn't in fact called Gerald Candless at all, the results have dramatic and far-reaching repercussions.

Making an unusual departure from the crime fiction genre, Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine) has written a deeply unsettling portrait of family life, populated by memorable but mostly unsympathetic characters; as Jean-Paul Sartre once said: 'Hell is other people.' Her sense of observation and psychological insights are acute and I emotionally winced more than once on behalf of a character after she had metaphorically stabbed them with her pen. Don't expect a lot of action here: the plot is almost entirely character driven and the pace is slow, enabling each character, especially Ursula, to tell their story. I enjoyed the family history angle of the mystery but did feel that the novel could have been around 30 to 50 pages shorter, without losing any of its impact. ( )

this is a bit hard for me to rate - i found the psychological character studies to be utterly fantastic. still, it was a bit dense for me and i found myself reading for ages and not getting through more than a handful of pages each time. some of the writing - while mostly very good - was a little tough for me, but that might have just been the "britishness" of it. i loved that this was a mystery that wasn't about a murder - i've been waiting for a book like that for so long - but initially didn't find the "reveal" to be believably traumatic enough for john to have so completely given up his previous life and family. having discussed it in a group, though, i do see how he thought death or disappearing (a kind of death) was the only recourse, and even more appreciate all the layers and depth she goes to throughout. i don't believe there is anything touched upon that isn't both entirely relevant and also completely resolved. it's a challenging read, but one where vine is trusting the reader to have the ability to go there with her, and i appreciate that.

also, i compulsively wanted to be continually reading this; it really grabbed me, in spite of being filled with generally awful and unrelateable characters. i'd like to read more of her work. ( )