The Bridesmaid In The Bridesmaid (1989), Inspector Wexford builds his outer and inner houses out of solid sanity and decorates them with a cheerful optimism, taking for granted that most of his fellow humans have a capacity for goodness; those who do not he must lock up. The bad characters do not so much construct their homes as allow them to go to seed, producing the squalid decaying suburbs of Rendell's modern London that parallels her view of the contemporary British spirit.

Rendell feels that if people have a choice of where they live, their houses reflect their characters, but if they are trapped by circumstance, "the effect on them must sometimes be very bad indeed." Rendell dissects one of the worst of those effects, the fatal combination of bad luck and bad choices. In a tale of two intertwining obsessions, she eerily demonstrates that whatever people...