“A Blood Affair” is yet another book about the Mafia. No, not the Russian Mafia, but the more classic version – American with Italian roots. It’s also about IRA and their deadly clashes with each other, about drug addicts – and about a young, beautiful, fragile woman caught in between.
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Mary is very fond of Sir Edgar Swift. When she was a girl of nineteen and he a man of forty-three, he seemed an old man, but now when she is thirty and he is fifty-four, the difference doesn’t look so great. So when he proposes to her, she doesn’t say no at once.
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“The Moving Toyshop” is a charmingly funny book about the adventure of Richard Cadogan, a prominent poet, in Oxford in 1938. On his arrival he finds a body of an elderly woman in a toyshop, but gets a strong hit on the top of the head. Once he recovers to fetch the police, he can’t find either the body or the toyshop itself. There is a grocery there instead, and the interior is quite different from what he remembers. No wonder the police think he imagined it all as the result of the concussion.
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“King Solomon’s Carpet” is one of the books Ruth Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine. An award-winning book, too, but I didn’t like it much when I read it for the first time, which must have been about four years ago. I found the book depressing and put it back on the shelf at once.
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