Against the will of her boyfriend, Alistair, Mary Jago volunteers to donate bone marrow. He beats her after finding out, so she breaks up with him and goes house-sitting for a rich couple in London. Leslie Bean, an old dog-walker, comes there twice a day to take the shih tzu Gushi out along with five other dogs.

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.I heard about Rendell being a famous thriller writer and I thought this could be good holiday reading. While Mary is dealing with relationship issues, others are making their lives very differently. Bean is a dogwalker who takes pride in where he lives, a residence willed to him when his wealthy employer died. Among others, Bean walks the dog belonging to the couple that Mary is housesitting for. Bean is ambitious and haughty, rather full of himself and not given to thinking well of others. The dogs put up with him but there is no evidence of any great affection towards him. Bean hatches a scheme to take advantage of his position to find little bits of dirt on his well-off employers and to use it to his advantage. The splitting of the narrative into the separate accounts of different characters makes us all the more reliant on the author. Facts about the murders emerge in passing. The naming and description of a victim, the collection of all known facts about a murder, are conventions of the narratives of detection familiar from film and TV as much as from novels. The Keys to the Street, however, has no incident room, no harassed detective. Though the police do play a part, it is marginal. Until the end, we encounter them only when they interrogate the characters. The detective who arrives to question Mary after Bean is found dead tells her that his killer was not the man who has murdered the novel's other victims. How do the police know? "We are not at liberty to tell you."

This wasn’t the first time I’ve read Ruth Rendell’s The Keys to the Street, but it has been a while, so there were parts that caught more of my attention this time, particularly the dog-related vignettes. I particularly enjoyed the dog-walker’s observation, “Pity there was no market for dog pornography,” as I’ve thought that myself many times. And I was amused by the “reasoning” of the intact beagle’s owner who was “hoping for pups some day.*” Rendell fans don’t need to be told that The Keys to the Street is well-written. The plot unfortunately was intrusively implausible, and the behavior of Roman, the main character, was unbelievable from start to finish. Readers looking for a good Rendell book about the intertwining lives of very different people ought to try Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.

John Mullan in The Guardian: "There's a manipulative plotter at work in The Keys to the Street, and it is the author." [2] Adaptation [ edit ] YFN Lucci feat. Lil Wayne & 2 Chainz – 'Key to the Streets (Remix)' ". Rap-Up. September 14, 2016 . Retrieved October 14, 2016.