“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
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