Word: fleshed
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...create these tales Rendell has spent quite a lot of time thinking about unpleasant people. The central character in Live Flesh, Rendell's 31st book of fiction in 22 years, is a rapist, mutilator and murderer. A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell's first under a new pen name, Barbara Vine, imagines a murder preceded by intimations of incest, infanticide and homosexual child molestation, all within the bosom of an apparently conventional and loving clan...
...Rendell fans, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that neither book features sly, plump, kindly old Reg Wexford and stern, judgmental, middle-aged John Burden. Live Flesh rests instead on a daring premise: a released convict's obsessive determination to make a friend of the policeman whom he shot and paralyzed while resisting capture. The policeman and the reader are alternately encouraged to believe in this felon's capacity for rehabilitation and disillusioned by his consuming selfishness. Complicating the uneasy relationship is the criminal's growing attraction toward the woman whom the policeman means to marry and cannot...
...surprising that a writer tempted to kill off her moneymaking detectives resists repeating herself. The New Girl Friend, a volume of short stories published earlier this year, displayed a dry, macabre humor. Live Flesh is an intimately detailed working-class character study. And A DarkAdapted Eye is a contemporary version of the sprawling Edwardian family tale and a minor classic. Its central theme is the nature of how to tell a story. It begins, and begins again and again -- each time more ripely. Its searching in direction after direction, its inclusion of swatches of pseudojournalism, its final metaphysical ruminations...
...covers such categories as media talk (show biz, glitz), government lingo (lame duck, on the stump), business idioms (the fine print, three-martini lunch) and cocktail patter (networking, finger food, breaking the ice). The final exam: a mock bash at which students will knock down real cocktails, press the flesh and chat up guests...
Oddly enough, it is this very flaw that enhances the credibility of Red Storm Rising. World War III, by most postulates, is not likely to involve a grand Tolstoyan sweep of personal valor. Arsenals and tactics might indeed be set in motion by the frailties of flesh-and-blood players, but once launched the lethal machines would take on a life of their own--almost like characters in a novel. That possibility, vividly rendered, is what gives Clancy's book such a chilling ring of truth...