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    Tigerlily's Orchids
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    Tigerlily's Orchids
    Unavailable
    Tigerlily's Orchids
    Audiobook7 hours

    Tigerlily's Orchids

    Written by Ruth Rendell

    Narrated by Nickolas Grace

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    When Stuart Font decides to throw a house-warming party in his new flat, he invites all the people in his building. After some deliberation, he even includes the unpleasant caretaker and his wife. There are a few other genuine friends on the list, but he definitely does not want to include his girlfriend, as that might involve asking her husband. The party will be one everyone remembers. But not for the right reasons. All the occupants of Lichfield House are about to experience a shocking change in their lives as Tigerlily casts her terrible spell...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateAug 1, 2010
    ISBN9781407424316
    Unavailable
    Tigerlily's Orchids
    Author

    Ruth Rendell

    Ruth Rendell (1930–2015) won three Edgar Awards, the highest accolade from Mystery Writers of America, as well as four Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre from England’s prestigious Crime Writ­ers’ Association. Her remarkable career spanned a half century, with more than sixty books published. A member of the House of Lords, she was one of the great literary figures of our time.

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    Reviews for Tigerlily's Orchids

    3.5/5

    124 ratings8 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I think the jacket blurb does this a disservice, it presents the story as something other than what it is. It is an ensemble piece, with the focus being a block of 6 flats in reasonably well off London. The occupants are a varied lot, along with the caretaker & his wife, Duncan over the road and the house next to his. this is where the Tigerlily of the title resides, but she is a barely visible presence. It starts with the life of Stuart Font, a curiously unlikable character who is all style and no substance. He's living off an inheritance and is taking a year out, with no clear plan of what to do, apart from gaze narcistically in the mirrors and continue his affair with Claudia. She's married (one suspects older) and her husband's not too impressed. He starts the book by planning a flat warming party, to which the residents and neighbours are invited. This is the piece that gets them all together, what happens sets up the murder with likely suspects, but it's not the climax of the piece. The thing I liked about this was the way that it's not one story, it's a series of intermingled stories. Very often you hear one person's internal monologue on viewing a situation, followed by the person they've been watching's thoughts on the subject. It presnets a picture of how people leap to conclusions about a situation, and can be wildly wrong. The relationship between Tigerlily and the older man is mentioned by at least 2 characters, neither of which get the true state of affairs. There are clues to the true state of affairs, but they don;t all necessarily fall into place until later. There are a multitude of sins in here, theft, drink, drugs, violence, murder, domestic violence, pedophilia. All of which get discussed and gone over by the neighbours over and again. It's a psychological portrait of a neighbourhood, how we interact, why we do or don;t do certain things and what the consequences of that might be, for ourselves and others.
    • 1/5
      I gave this one star only because I couldn't give it any less. If you are expecting a RR crime novel then pass on by. Turgid writing and reading.
    • 3/5
      More about the people living in a small apartment building in London than about the crime that's committed, Tigerlily's Orchids was not a typical mystery. It's the first book by Ruth Rendell that I've read, so I might be describing all of her books and not know it.

      In any case, I enjoyed it.
    • 1/5
      I really did not enjoy this book. The description of the book is misleading. It seemed to me that by the description there would be a supernatural element to the story, but there was nothing of the sort. The structure of the novel overall seemed off. There was no clear flow to the story; things just seemed to happen spontaneously. Also, the author's style did not agree with me. The way that information was passed to the reader seemed forced and amateur. The characters did not seem very realistic to me and I couldn't connect to them. I finished the book so that I could see if bad things happened to the characters I didn't like. Unsurprisingly, they did. But even when those characters got what was coming to them, it was written in such a way to be very unsatisfying. I've noticed that other reviews have mentioned that they expected better from this author. This is my first read of this author and I would be wary of picking up another one of her books.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of the inhabitants of Lichfield House, an apartment building in a London suburb where everyone has a secret. The novel has a touch of Rear Window; a neighbor across the street spies on Lichfield House and makes up stories about its denizens. The plot was a little too violent for me, and there was a shortage of likable characters, but Rendell is a good writer.
    • 3/5
      Definitely a character driven novel. It was difficult in the beginning to keep them all in my head, but Rendell's plot thread quickly wove them all into a whole cloth. It wasn't my favorite of hers, but I did enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      This book was not quite as good as I've come to expect from all her other books, but any Ruth Rendell book is head and shoulders over a lot of other authors that write in her genre. Ms. Rendell has a unique writing style that pulls the reader in, quite seductively, into a world of unimaginable horror. I found this book did not have the same menace as most of her other books, and the sense of danger just wasn't there as much. But her characters are wonderfully drawn and realistic. Her setting is described perfectly, so the reader feels that they are right there. She has an uncanny knack of turning simple, everyday things into something threatening and frightening. I will not miss any of her books.
    • 4/5
      This is not a classic mystery; the first body appears in the second half of the book and there is no detective. This novel weaves together psychological portraits of several people, all neighbours in a London suburb: a young, non-practising doctor who writes poorly researched medical articles, a reclusive woman who is determined to drink herself to death, an apartment caretaker who spends his free time near schoolyards, a narcissistic "pretty boy" carrying on an adulterous affair, two former hippies, three semi-serious university students, an elderly widower living in an overly warm house, a beautiful Oriental girl. Relationships among these characters and events in the neighbourhood are observed from the points of view of various residents.A major theme is that people tend to make assumptions and form conclusions based on incomplete information. People often feel they know others well when, in fact, they don't, and don't have a complete understanding of events around them.Readers of Ruth Rendell (and Barbara Vine) will enjoy this book.