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A review by bookishsteph1
A Spot of Folly: Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Murder and Mayhem by Sophie Hannah, Ruth Rendell
4.0
Book 57 of 2017 - A Spot of Folly by Ruth Rendell. I gave this one, which is published on October 5th, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. .
This was my first time reading anything by one of the queens of crime, Ruth Rendell, and I was very pleasantly surprised by this set of ten and a quarter tales, including stories with themes of crime, murder, hauntings and the end of the world. .
What I found so great about this collection is that the stories are quite dark and dastardly, with every character getting their comeuppance or eloquent ending and that they fail to, as Sophie Hannah writes in the introduction, "make the imaginative leap from knowing what they're capable of to working out that others might be capable of similar immorality". .
Each story is really well written and atmospheric with some twists and turns along the way making them a bit unpredictable and able to elicit a few evil chuckles from me. I do love a dark story with an unhappy ending for particularly unlikeable characters. Speaking of characters, all the cast of these stories were well developed and I didn't feel cheated out of a longer story. Rendell definitely perfected the short story format, which is shown perfectly in the 'quarter' of a story, Never Sleep in a Bed Facing a Mirror, which is only three paragraphs long but works really well. .
If you like Agatha Christie or the short stories of Daphne du Maurier then you should read this one! .
This was my first time reading anything by one of the queens of crime, Ruth Rendell, and I was very pleasantly surprised by this set of ten and a quarter tales, including stories with themes of crime, murder, hauntings and the end of the world. .
What I found so great about this collection is that the stories are quite dark and dastardly, with every character getting their comeuppance or eloquent ending and that they fail to, as Sophie Hannah writes in the introduction, "make the imaginative leap from knowing what they're capable of to working out that others might be capable of similar immorality". .
Each story is really well written and atmospheric with some twists and turns along the way making them a bit unpredictable and able to elicit a few evil chuckles from me. I do love a dark story with an unhappy ending for particularly unlikeable characters. Speaking of characters, all the cast of these stories were well developed and I didn't feel cheated out of a longer story. Rendell definitely perfected the short story format, which is shown perfectly in the 'quarter' of a story, Never Sleep in a Bed Facing a Mirror, which is only three paragraphs long but works really well. .
If you like Agatha Christie or the short stories of Daphne du Maurier then you should read this one! .