Rating: 9/10
- Plot: A cultured country family hires a silent, efficient housekeeper, never guessing the secret she guards.
- Clues: All given away on the first page; the suspense is how and why.
- Reveal: The opening line announces the ending, yet the final chapters are still terrifying.
The novel opens by telling you who killed the Coverdale family, and why: the housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, did it because she could not read or write. The rest of the book shows how it happened.
The Coverdales are an educated, liberal, well-meaning family who live in a large house called Lowfield Hall. They hire Eunice, who is capable, silent and apparently content. They never realise she is illiterate. Her shame, and her terror of being found out, gradually shape her relationship with the family, while she falls under the influence of Joan Smith, a religious fanatic who runs the village post office.
Rendell’s decision to reveal everything at the start turns the book into a study of inevitability. Every small misunderstanding, every kind gesture misread, moves the story closer to catastrophe. The Coverdales are not villains, but their obliviousness and condescension are part of the tragedy.
Eunice is one of the most chilling figures in crime fiction. She is neither monstrous nor sympathetic, but a person cut off from the world by a secret she guards, and incapable of empathy.
The weakness is the portrayal of Joan Smith, who verges on caricature, and a middle section that some readers find slow. But these are minor.
The 9 reflects one of Rendell’s masterpieces and one of the great crime novels of the decade. Claude Chabrol’s film La Cérémonie (1995) is a powerful adaptation.
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