Book description
'Someone had told Dex that the Queen lived in Victoria. So did he,
but she had a palace and he had one room in a street off Warwick
Way. Still he liked the idea that she was his neighbour.'
Dex works as a gardener for Dr Jefferson at his home on Hexam Place
in Pimlico: an exclusive street of white-painted stucco Georgian
houses inhabited by the rich, and serviced by the not so rich. The
hired help, a motley assortment of au pairs, drivers and
cleaners, decide to form the St Zita Society (Zita was the patron
saint of domestic servants) as an excuse to meet at the local pub and
air their grievances.
When Dex is invited to attend one of these meetings, the others find
that he is a strange man, seemingly ill at ease with human beings.
These first impressions are compounded when they discover he has
recently been released from a hospital for the criminally insane,
where he was incarcerated for attempting to kill his own mother. Dex's
most meaningful relationship seems to be with his mobile phone service
provider, Peach, and he interprets the text notifications and messages
he receives from the company as a reassuring sign that there is some
kind of god who will protect him. And give him instructions about
ridding the world of evil spirits . . .
Accidental death and pathological madness cohabit above and below
stairs in Hexam Place.
Ruth Rendell is the Queen of British crime writing. The author of
over 50 novels, she has won many significant crime fiction awards. Her
first novel, From Doon With Death, appeared in 1964, and since
then her reputation and readership have grown steadily with each new
book.
She has received major awards for her work; three Edgars from the
Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award for
1976's best crime novel, A Demon in My View; the Arts Council
National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for The Lake of
Darkness; the Crime Writer's Gold Dagger Award for 1986's best
crime book for Live Flesh; in 1987 the Crime Writer's Gold
Dagger Award for A Fatal Inversion and in 1991 the same award
for King Solomon's Carpet, both written under the pseudonym
Barbara Vine; the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990; and in
1991 the Crime Writer's Cartier Diamond Award for outstanding
contribution to the crime fiction genre.
Her books are translated into 21 languages. In 1996 she was awarded
the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.
