This is one of my hardbacks that I first read and finished Fr 2/16/07. The note on the flyleaf says that I took 'E-Time' at 1115am due to an antifreeze leak in Brown's truck on the way to Godfrey/ Maryville.
Ruth Rendell is a master at creating a snapshot of the mind of a madman. She really makes evil understandable.
Michael (Mix) Cellini is a young man who repairs exercise equipment for a living.
He lives in an old and disheveled house owned by Miss Chawcer. He has the attic apartment and it's 13 steps to his door.
He is obsessed with a 1950's killer, Reggie Christie.
The house is in northwest London and also the neighborhood of Christie, but his house has been torn down.
Mix is also obsessed with a London super-model, Nerissa.
Mix tracks Nerissa to a gym owned by Madame Shoshana.
Nerissa didn't workout at this club, but visited Madame Shoshana to have her fortune told.
While at the club Mix meets Danila who worked as a receptionist.
Mix dates Danila, but murders her because she disrespected the poster of Nerissa that hung in Mix's room. He puts her beneath the floorboards in the next room, but Miss Chawcer suspects something so he buries Danila in the garden.
Mix thinks that he is seeing the ghost of Reggie Christie, but it is really an asylum seeker from Iraq that is secretly living in the house.
From the review at Kirkus:
"Another brilliantly rendered Rendellscape in which the central figure is the blond, blue-eyed psychopath next door.
They are the essence of ordinary, Rendell’s monsters—no one’s ever sure how to describe them. Eyes? Well, maybe blue, maybe gray. Hair? Blond probably. Or maybe blond fading to brown. Like Michael Cellini—the latest in a long list of unremarkable archfiends from Rendell (The Babes in the Woods, 2003, etc.)—they are meticulously designed to pass in a crowd. Michael calls himself Mix, and we meet him first in the grip of one of his two obsessions. The street where John Reginald Halliday Christie, famed serial killer, formerly lived, has been obliterated, replaced by what Mix calls up-market soullessness. Mix is outraged. Christie’s house should have been preserved as a museum, Mix as curator. Why not? Who, after all, knows more about Reggie? And then there’s Mix’s new landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer: elderly, eccentric and a snob. She views Mix as irredeemably vulgar, resents the straitened circumstances that compel her to accept him as a lodger. Perfect embodiments of class warfare, the two detest each other on sight, and this will have chilling ramifications. In the meantime, here’s Mix’s second obsession: a beautiful young model named Nerissa Nash. On his wall, there’s a poster of her, iconic. He worships at it, idealizing her and wanting her passionately. In the weird, parallel universe he’s created, she wants him with equal fervor—so that what he conceives of as wooing, she, in terror, considers stalking. And, inevitably, this, too, will have the chilling ramifications that have become Rendell’s nail-biting stock in trade.
Masterful, as usual. No one does evil better."
From the Penquin Random House page:
"Mix Cellini has just moved into a flat in a decaying house in Nottinghill, where he plans to pursue his two abiding passions–supermodel Nerissa Nash, whom he worships from afar, and the life of serial killer Reggie Christie, hanged fifty years earlier for murdering at least eight women. Gwendolen Chawcer, Mix’s eighty-year-old landlady, has few interests besides her old books and her new tenant. But she does have an intriguing connection to Christie. And when reality intrudes into Mix’s life, he turns to Christie for inspiration and a long pent-up violence explodes. Intricately plotted and brilliantly written, 13 Steps Down enters the minds of these disparate people as they move inexorably toward its breathtaking conclusion."
I found out that several years ago a two part mini-series was made of the book. I will be watching this on YouTube this afternoon when I workout at Planet Fitness.
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