A Judgement in Stone

By Ruth Rendell

What on earth could have provoked a modern day St. Valentine's Day massacre?

On Valentine's Day, four members of the Coverdale family--George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles--were murdered in the space of 15 minutes. Their housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, shot them, one by one, in the blue light of a televised performance of Don Giovanni. When Detective Chief Superintendent William Vetch arrests Miss Parchman two weeks later, he discovers a second tragedy: the key to the Valentine's Day massacre hidden within a private humiliation Eunice Parchman has guarded all her life. A brilliant rendering of character, motive, and the heady discovery of truth, A Judgement in Stone is among Ruth Rendell's finest psychological thrillers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307557186

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.

Reviews for A Judgement in Stone

[candyh_64 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a strange book to my thinking. How one person could inflict so much bloodshed and violence due to the inability to read or write is beyond me. I just did not care for this story.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." There now...you want to read the novel, don't you? That first sentence certainly grabbed my attention. No mystery about whodunit, or missing children, or murderers trying to escape apprehension--just a fascinating examination of the motivation of a woman lacking education, imagination, humor or conscience. Over 150 pages we come to know and like the Coverdales, a perfectly nice (but not "perfect") family desperate for a housekeeper, who hire Eunice without asking for references, and are initially delighted with her performance. She is efficiency itself, nothing is too much trouble for her, she's satisfied with her wages and accommodations, in short, they consider themselves extraordinarily lucky to have her. Even when misgivings begin to creep in, they bend over backwards not to offend her, because peace, domestic comfort and a well-run home were worth almost any price. Eunice is strange, but she isn't mad; but then she falls in with a local shopkeeper and former prostitute who persuades her to join the Epiphany Brethren, an evangelical religious "camp" with some even stranger notions of sanctity and vengeance. Since we know from the beginning that the Coverdales are doomed, it's bittersweet watching them go about their ordinary pleasant and privileged life, all unaware of the fate that awaits them. When Eunice's friend goes off the deep end, she pulls Eunice right along with her, but Eunice is neither surprised nor alarmed by the outcome. "A stone that breathed was Eunice, as she had always been." For psychological thrills and gold-plated irony, you can't beat Ruth Rendell. She really delivered the goods with this one.

[cecilturtle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would say this is Rendell's finest: we know everything right from the beginning, all the layers are peeled very quickly so that culprit, motive, murder, weapon, all are at the forefront. Yet Rendell keeps us captivated as she unfolds the details of the story, dropping little fragments of the future here and there to keep the reader engrossed and wondering how the police will discover the murder - and will she get away with it. I loved every bit, even the tiresome Joan Smith. Brilliant!

[janerawoof · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic novel about a housekeeper who for no APPARENT reason murders members of a family, together with an eccentric, religious fanatic friend. The woman's secret, that she holds fast to her breast and tries to hide from others, controls her life and leads her to her actions.

[kevinrtipple · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We know from the first line of Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement In Stone who did the crime. Eunice Parchman killed the Cloverdale family. We know from the second line of the compelling book the reason why she did it. But, that reason is far more complicated than described. Yet, at the same time, it truly is as simple as described. What happened at Lowfield Hall, the Cloverdale home located ten miles outside the small village of Stantwich, is fairly clear. Why it happened at the manor home is as complicated as the layers of an onion. If one little thing had been done differently the crime could have been stopped in so many ways. Yet, it wasn’t as events and quite possible fate itself made sure of the crime.A Judgement In Stone is not a classic mystery. Readers know from the start the crime, the guilty party, and the stated motivation. Instead, the read is a very complicated character study. Not just of the killer Eugene Parchman, but everyone in the book. Her accomplice who is clearly insane by the time of the brutal killings, the victims known as the Cloverdales, as well as the people of the local town, and many others. Every crime leaves a wake of eek of wreckage in its wake. That wake of wreckage in all its parts-- big and small-- is what the very good A Judgement In Stone by Ruth Rendell is all about from start to finish.My thanks to Barry Ergang who provided an e-book version for me to read and review.Kevin R. Tipple ©2016

[burritapal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Would you kill a whole family of four because they found out you couldn't read? Well that's what you Eunice Parchment, their housekeeper, did.

In "a judgment in stone," Ruth Rendell creates the character of Eunice Parchman, a volcano waiting to explode (if you find out that she can't read.) A stodgy, Big woman who dresses like a policewoman, Eunice has had people offer to teach her to read but no-o-o-o-o, Eunice doesn't want that. I cracked up when the author would very often remind the reader that someone leaving notes for Eunice, or asking her to look at an article in a magazine was "not a smart thing to do!", making us all so scared of her!

Before the Coverdales find Eunice, Jacqueline Coverdale employs Eva Baalham, a woman who is poor, but Gentry!, whose ancestors have lived in Greeving (UK) for 500 years. Eva barely does any work, which is why Jacqueline Coverdale is looking for a housekeeper.
".... She [Eva] didn't like Jacqueline, who was mutton dressed as lamb and who gave herself some mighty airs for the wife of the owner of a tin can factory. All that will-you-be-so-good and thank-you-so-much nonsense..."

Joan Smith and her husband Norman own a shop and the mini post office in the closest town to the Coverdales. Joan Smith belongs to a cult, and it's in the stars that the two of them will meet, Joan and Eunice.
A bit like Eunice, who suffocated her father when he wanted Eunice to look after him as she had her invalid mother, Joan encourages her mother-in-law towards death.
"Norman had no idea how she earned her living, believing her story that she had taken in typing and occasionally been a freelance secretary. They lived with his mother. After a year or two of furious daily quarrels with old Mrs smith, Joan found the best way of keeping her quiet was to encourage her hitherto controlled fondness for the bottle. Gradually she got Mrs Smith to the stage of spending her savings on half a bottle of whiskey a day.
... So old Mrs smith, with Joan's encouragement, became a self-appointed invalid. For most of each day she was in bed with her whiskey, and Joan helped matters along by crushing into the sugar in her tea three or four of the tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed for her own 'nerves.' With her mother-in-law more or less comatose, Joan returned by day to the old life and the flat in Shepherd's Bush. She made very little money at it and her sexual encounters had become distasteful to her. a remarkable fact about Joan was that, though she had had sexual relations with hundreds of men as well as with her own husband, she had never made love for pleasure or had a 'conventional' illicit affair except with the bakers roundsman. It is hard to know why she continued as a prostitute. Out of perversity perhaps, or as a way of defying Norman's extreme working-class respectability."

Giles Mont, Jacqueline's son from her previous marriage, and Melinda's step brother, is a strange sort. He's brilliant, but has terrible acne. He has a fascination with Melinda.
"... He saw them sharing their flat, devout Catholics both, but going through agonies to maintain their chaste and continent condition. Perhaps he would become a priest, and if Melinda were to enter a convent they might - say twice a year - have special dispensation to meet and, soberly garbed, have tea together in some humble cafe, not daring to touch hands. Or like Lancelot and Guinevere, but without the preceding pleasures, encounter each other across a cathedral nave, gaze long and long, then part without a word. . ."

Eunice, in her youth, had been accustomed to blackmail people. she never asked for much, 10 shillings a week or so, but when Melinda discovers her inability to read, she thinks she can blackmail Melinda by telling her family about her pregnancy scare.
" 'why didn't you tell us?' She said as Eunice got up. 'We'd have understood. Lots of people are dyslexic, thousands of people actually. I did some work on a study of it in my last year at school. Miss Parchman, shall I teach you to read? I'm sure I could. It would be fun. I could begin in the Easter holidays.'
Eunice took the two mugs and set them on the draining board. She stood still with her back to Melinda. She poured the remains of her tea down the sink. Then she turned around slowly and, with no outward sign that her heart was drumming fast and heavily, fixed Melinda with her apparently emotionless implacable stare.
'if you tell anyone I'm what you said, that word, I'll tell your dad you've been going with that boy and you're going to have a baby.'
She spoke so slowly and calmly that at first Melinda hardly understood. She had led a sheltered life and no one had ever really threatened her before.
'what did you say?'
'you heard. You tell them and I'll tell them about you.' Abuse wasn't Eunice's Forte but she managed. 'Dirty little tart, that's what you are. Dirty interfering little bitch.'
Melinda went white. She got up and walked out of the kitchen, stumbling over her long skirt. Out in the hall her legs almost gave way, she was shaking so much, and she sat down in the chair by the grandfather clock. She sat there with her fists pressed to her cheeks till the clock chimed six and the kitchen door opened. A wave of sickness hit her at the thought of even seeing Eunice Parchman again, and she fled into the drawing room where she fell onto the sofa and burst into tears."

When Melinda's father finds out what Eunice told her, he sends her to her room, and tells her not to come out until she leaves, a week later, while she looks for another job. But George Coverdale has not reckoned with Joan Smith's influence on Eunice.

[rodneyp-449373 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well this is a remarkable and eerie book. A striking ending. The best mystery I have read in as long time. Reading is vital.

[olivermagnus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ruth Rendell opens the book with a fantastic line “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” The Coverdales are a wealthy family living in Lowfield Hall, a country house in Suffolk. George is manager of his family business and sees himself the local squire. His second wife Jacqueline is an indifferent housewife who, desperate for domestic help, recruits stodgy Eunice Parchman at the beginning of the book. Also living at the Hall are George’s exuberant and attractive daughter Melinda and Jacqueline’s bookish and remote son Giles.

Eunice starts out quite well and soon becomes indispensable, but within just a few months things have gone very wrong and she, along with her accomplice Joan Smith, kill the Coverdales with George’s shotgun on Valentine's Day. This is not a spoiler since the author herself tells you the ending in the first few pages. By the end of the second chapter we know what’s going to happen and even why. This is one of those books that made me wonder if there could be any sort of surprise in its pages. Well....this is one of the most effective suspense novels I've ever read. The tension continues to rise so gradually that by the time I got to the murders I could hardly stand it. Even knowing how it ends doesn't diminish the anxiety.

The structure is probably more like a true crime book than a work of fiction. It's a wonderfully told story and I highly recommend it.

[featherbear · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Family mass murder (cp. Gardner’s Live to tell). Rendell has some unpleasant prejudices that are more obvious in her early novels, of which this is one. Eunice Parchman and Joan Smith are troll-like English lower class characters seen through the unsympathetic spectacles of a future member of the House of Lords. How much richer and tragic the novel could have been had the trolls been created with more empathy. As it is, they are figures in a black comedy with Parchman’s attempts to avoid revealing her illiteracy and Smith’s religious mania driving the murder of the Coverdales (who are much more recognizably human, devotees of opera and theology, and definitely untroll-like).

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book wasn't the type of crime novel I generally read; it isn't a mystery or a thriller or even very suspenseful. You learn who the killer is in the very first sentence and what her motive was. And yet, Rendell managed to hold my interest the entire book.

I did find some of Rendell's statements about the illiterate bothersome. These things may be true for some illiterate people (obviously she has made them true about her character Eunice Parchman) but I doubt that they are true for all of them.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jacqueline and George are each in their second marriages; his first wife died, her husband deserted her. They are both very happy, and George, wealthy owner of a factory, has purchased a huge Victorian home that is just too large for Jacqueline to manage. Most of the children have left home except for Giles, Jacqueline’s son by her first marriage, a brilliant troubled eccentric, brilliant who hates living in the country, and Melinda, George’s youngest daughter, whom Giles has an incestuous passion for, envisioning her as the wasted tubercular love of his life. In order to lighten Jacqueline’s workload, George decides to hire a housekeeper, and Jacqueline is delighted to discover Eunice Parchman, who even addresses her as “madam.” Eunice, who fudges her references, turns out to be the ideal housekeeper with one exception: she cannot read, and it is this little detail that leads her to eventually kill the entire family. Not that they didn’t try to make her happy. Eunice had her own bedroom and the old telly, and a well-sprung bed; after all, they wanted her to be content and to stay. But they never considered her as a person. They knew nothing of her background, never asked, and if they had, they probably would not have believed it. That she could have attended school without having become literate and learned to love opera. Heavens! Ironically, it’s Melinda’s attempt to learn the truth that initiates the catastrophe.

[dihiba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ruth Rendell is such a good writer that she can reveal the plot ending and you still want to read the book just to find out how it all comes together. This was one of her best ones (and I've read many) - almost lyrically written and the family so lovingly drawn that I kept thinking there was no way she was going to kill them off. A great study of psychopathy fueled by illiteracy.

[jillmwo-74323 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How does conflict within relationships build up to the point of murder? This is the question that Ruth Rendell seeks to answer. Eunice Parchman joins the Coverdale household as a housekeeper and ends by killing her employer and relatives. But how can such a thing happen when Eunice appears to be so bland and self-effacing? The strength of this tale is the narrative built through careful description of incorrect assumptions about a person and the unfortunate misunderstandings that follow. Excellent writing supports a story that tells you in the first fifty pages the bare facts of the crime and the secret Eunice harbors, but then another 200 pages outlines how the conflict built to the point of a massacre. Almost no blood and guts on the page, but not by any means a cozy read. Marvelous early work by Ruth Rendell!

[curlycurrie_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a real page turner. Even though the murder and the motive was revealed in the first sentence it was impossible to put this down. Once again Ruth Rendell has created a world that draws the reader in and has them living the lives of the characters. The writing and character creations are inspirational. This has confirmed Ruth Rendell (also writing as Barbara Vine) as on of my all time favourinte authors.

[goose114_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is probably one of the best suspense novels I have read. By the end of the first sentence the reader knows who is the murderer, who is murdered, and a motive. The story of how the events unfold is truly fascinating. The Coverdales hire Eunice Parchman to be their housecleaner. Eunice has a dark past and a secret that she is determined to keep, her illiteracy. The Coverdales are an upper-middle class family that enjoys the arts and literature. Eunice is uncomfortable by their constant reliance on the written word and is fearful of having to demonstrate her reading ability. Eunice befriends a zealot of a religious sect who teetered on emotional instability. This friendship leads to further discomfort with the Coverdales. I was constantly waiting for the big event that tips the scales and found myself on the edge of my seat while reading.The characters are original and intriguing. The Coverdales are both pompous, but likable, and their relationship with Eunice and others makes them at times cold, but understandable. Eunice is a character I both sympathized for, but feared. Her lack of emotion and constant fear made her pathetic and dangerous all at once. The relationships between the characters and the events that took place engulfed me. I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys a suspense filled novel.

[sarah1e · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a fascinating story! The first sentence grabbed my attention and I could not put the book down before I had finished. It can be so wonderful to get totally engrossed in a story, so I really recommend this book to anyone taking a long trip - reading the whole thing on a plane or on a roadtrip (as I did) would be quite satisfying.I have not read many mysteries but I didn't at all find the plot predictable, aside from the fact that the first sentence gives the crime completely away. The characters are what makes this story so fascinating - the roles of villain and victim blur and cross, and at times all the characters are equally unlikable or endearing. The book is heavy on setting, so I really enjoyed being in a place that was entirely new to me - the English countryside in the 1970's. This is absolutely a new favorite of mine!

[bookmarque · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This really was excellent. The technique of telling the ending at the beginning worked brilliantly. I wanted to see the degradation of Eunice into a killer. To know how she could live her life without being able to read. I take it so for granted that I can read. I wouldn’t know how to live without being able to and I don’t know how I could feel the way Eunice must have felt. She likened it to a deformity or affliction. A disease. Literacy is so bound up in what we think of as civilization. The lack of written words is evidence of lack of culture and evolution. But Eunice essentially killed them because she couldn’t read. It was interesting how isolated she was. How little insight into human nature she had. Whenever the son left his monthly quote on his bb, she thought it was a statement to or about her. Same with the treatment of her by the daughter – she was trying to be nice and friendly and Eunice thought she was mocking her and tormenting her on purpose. She had no idea that her accomplice was nuts. She thought that Joan was normal.