If I had the time or natural attention span to read a book in one sitting, The Crocodile Bird would be an easy thriller to escape into for a day.

Over the course of one hundred and one nights, Liza and Sean live out of an old caravan barely big enough for a bed and a kitchen sink while she confesses to him her dissenting upbringing, the truth of what went on in Shrove House, and the men her mother murdered who threatened to intervene. Told in retrospect, Rendell’s Scheherazade disobeys her mother’s instruction-probably for the first time ever-and instead of escaping to London, Liza runs off with her lover, Sean. It wasn’t all those times she had been locked inside her tiny bedroom and left alone while her mother went to town for groceries, the key kept in her mother’s pocket, a gentle reminder her daughter was safe, or even the time she witnessed her mother sick a pack of Dobermans on a man right there on their front porch, their teeth shining as they tore at the man’s old skin, nipping at the man’s neck, yellow beard caught in open mouths between bites but “a minute or two after nine on an evening in late August,” that was when the falling apart of things started, and the first time Liza had ever known fear. “I can’t trust you to tell lies as well as I can,” her mother told her.Ĭircumstances collided then with an estranged, unmet virginity. The book begins at nine in the evening when “the world began to fall apart” as Eve tells Liza that she will have to leave Shrove House-“for your own protection”-to go away to London all on her own after having spent sixteen years believing the world stopped at the iron gates that barricaded them inside. Liza and her mother, Eve, lived in Shrove’s gatehouse, which was also home to every memory Liza had ever made. Cornices crowned with stone, sun-touched walls and slate that glittered with a “dreamy grayness,” countless windows, soaring steps, a haunting of bats and an army of statues standing watch in its alcoves, Shrove House is a Gothic, palace-like mansion set in the heart of an otherwise lifeless moor, isolated as Liza herself. Raised by her furtive but guiltless mother, Liza Beck knew no other world to exist outside that of Shrove House.

That’s when I was four and that’s when she killed the first one.”

“I’ll tell you from back as far as I can remember. The Crocodile Bird, by Ruth Rendell, 1993

The crocodile bird ruth rendell review