编辑推荐Amazon.com ReviewWriting as Ruth Rendell, Barbara Vine has earned the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. In The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, Vine proves herself the equal of her alter ego and a master of the psychological thriller--as well as the police procedural--in this riveting novel. Why bestselling novelist Gerald Candless assumed a new identity years before his marriage and the birth of his two daughters isn't revealed until the penultimate chapter of the book, but the effect of his deception on his family drives Vine's deft character studies. In Gerald's wife, Ursula, and his daughters, Hope and Sarah, Vine has created three complex women in the thrall of an equally complicated and compelling man. As Sarah unravels the mystery of her father's deception, Gerald gradually becomes a more sympathetic figure. But Ursula, whose strange marital bargain with Gerald and whose distant relationship with her daughters tug at the heart, stays with the reader long after this distinguished, literary mystery is finished. --Jane Adams--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal Michael Williams reads popular author Vine's (No Night Is Too Long, Audio Reviews, LJ 4/15/95) compelling tale in a gently affecting manner. Gerald Candless played only two roles in life: best-selling author and doting father. Or did he? Commissioned to write a personal biography of her famous father, Sarah Candless discovers that the real Gerald died at age seven. Who was the man she called Father and how did he turn into a cold, emotional isolate who cared only for his daughters? A few incidental characters and episodes seem out of place, probably due to abridgment, but this is a minor quibble. Overall, this is an entertaining listening experience in the low-violence mystery/suspense genre. Recommended for all libraries.?I. Pour-El, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews A dead author turns out to be anything but the blandly successful public figure he'd pretended to be for 40 years, in Ruth Rendell's ninth as Barbara Vinea slow-moving, richly textured suspenser. Even as Gerald Candless was making a comfortable living from a long series of novels that reviewers praised as wise and humane, his private life told another story. His loyal wife Ursula, civilly estranged from any intimacy with him ever since the birth of their daughter Hope, deals with his sudden death by snipping the stamps from his voluminous correspondence and discarding the envelopes, then going back to work as a day-care provider. The daughters Gerald was so close to--the obituary they compose describes him as ``adored''--are more properly grief-stricken. But when older daughter Sarah agrees to take time from her womens studies research at the University of London to write a biography of her father, her tears swiftly turn to astonishment that everything he told his family about his early life was false. In the face of the chronicle of his early years that Sarah and Hope had dutifully recycled for his obituary, Gerald Candless hadn't existed before 1951, when an enterprising young journalist decided to swap his identity for that of a child long dead of meningitis. What made Gerald Candless's identity so attractive to the young man who went on to reinvent himself in a score of tantalizingly veiled novels--or what made the identity he fled so unbearable? Vine's many fans will take it as no more than their due to find that Gerald's mystery is wrapped around a forgotten murder, but even they may be surprised to learn what role Gerald played in the killing. Not at the level of The Brimstone Wedding (1996), this latest excursion into the harrowing past shows Vine at her most weblike, with the murder case that Sarah Candless backs into almost an afterthought in a novel whose people--right up to the final merciful release--all seem long dead, dying, or hopelessly immured in the past. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Although this guilt-riddled, self-absorbed character is neither as interesting nor as mysteriously motivated as the women who drop the clues, he has commanding presence as a novelist. -- The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio As Boy's tantalizing puzzle unravels ... the book delivers the oft-discounted pleasures of the page-turner. -- Entertainment Weekly, Darcy Lockman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Patricia CornwellUnequivocally the most brilliant mystery novelist of our times.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition. |
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