The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

'When we get to wherever we're going,' she said, 'I'll tell you the story of my life.'
'Right.'
'I don't know, but I don't think there've been many lives like mine.'
'You've got a long way to go with it yet, like maybe seventy years.'
'Can I have the last chip? I'll tell from back as far as I can remember. That's when I was four and that's when she killed the first one.'

She pulled a length from the toilet roll he kept by the bed to use as tissues and wiped her mouth. When she turned back to him to say she was ready, they could be off as soon as he liked, she saw that he was staring at her and the look on his face was aghast.

The Crocodile Bird is a fairly old book, originally published in 1993, but that doesn't matter with books like this. The story is about a Liza, a girl who has lived enclosed life together with her mother, but who has to leave home because the latest murder her mother has commited has just come out and police are on their way to arrest her. She tells her story to her boyfriend from the beginning - so it's not as much a whodunnit than an insight into people's minds and what makes them tick.

Very good book: good characters, good story. Although you know or guess quite a lot in the beginning of the book, it still retains the grip until the very last page. You know the murders will happen, and at first you think it's going to be unrealistic, but to my surprise the motives and the conditions at the time of the murder actually make them believable, and the characters make them believable.

I also love how Ruth Rendell describes the environment - you have the isolated mansion and the gate-house somewhere in isolated English countryside, and you have big village with the supermarkets and rich people with house keepers. Liza and her boyfriend live in a caravan doing odd jobs, and Liza is like Scheherazade telling her sultan a new marvellous story every night.

Loved this book, one of Rendell's best.