Mix is troubled by the number thirteen, which seems to crop up everywhere he goes -Nerissa's house number is thirteen, and there are thirteen stairs to climb between his landlady's part of the house and his own self-contained flat on the third floor. Here in the meticulously clean apartment, he divides his time between reading about 'Reggie', as he has come to refer privately to Christie, and inventing wild fantasies involving himself and Nerissa, whose portrait takes pride of place on the living room wall.

Gwendolen Chawcer is Mix's landlady. A spinster now in her eighties, she has led a rather sheltered life, having been educated at home by her professor father, before making the natural progression to housekeeper until his death at the ripe old age of 94. The house passed to Gwendolen upon her father's death, and with the exception of two elderly women who insist on calling themselves her friends, she rarely mixes, preferring the company of her many hundreds of books.

Like Mix, Gwendolen is a dreamer. At the age of thirty, she developed a crush on her dying mother's physician, convincing herself that he had fallen for her in the same way, but after her mother passed away, the doctor never returned to the house. That was fifty years ago, but Gwendolen has never given up hope that he'll come back for her, and when she reads the Daily Telegraph's announcement of the death of 'Eileen, beloved wife of Dr Stephen Reeves', she sets about trying to track him down.

Rendell's description of the dilapidated old house is superbly detailed, from the grime-encrusted stained glass windows which block out the sunlight, to the ancient, heavy furniture in the oversized hallway, overlooked by huge cobwebs hanging from the high ceilings. It's a dismal, eerie old place, and it's quite easy to imagine Mix's discomfort whenever he climbs the three flights of stairs, the lighting system's built-in timer always ensuring that he has to tackle the last few in total darkness.

Within the first few chapters Rendell builds up a remarkably in-depth profile of both the main characters, and the similarities between Gwendolen's and Mix's personalities are overwhelmingly apparent. Poles apart in terms of their backgrounds - Gwendolen's upbringing was over-protected and privileged, while Mix grew up with a loving, but domestically inept mother and a violent stepfather - they share a number of common traits. Both are natural loners, social misfits even, each living in their own private fantasy world. Both are ill-mannered and neither sees anything wrong in using others for their own convenience - in short, they're a pretty unpleasant pair, little deserving of any sympathy.

Of the two, Gwendolen is the less credible. It's quite likely that as a naïve thirty-year-old, unused to male company, she would have become besotted with the doctor, and it's also feasible that as the years passed, she would have harboured thoughts of what might have been had things turned out differently. Somehow though, I couldn't quite get my head around the idea of a plain-speaking, anti-social, and unworldly octogenarian having the inclination to trace somebody with whom she's had no contact for fifty years. Likewise, I found her instant attraction to her younger, Indian-born neighbour, mainly on the grounds of his beautifully spoken English, a little difficult to swallow, and generally, I found her constant fantasising a little silly and irritating.

Mix's character, on the other hand, is worryingly believable, and Rendell's ability to see inside the warped mind of a potentially dangerous stalker is quite disturbing. We often read about females in the public eye being harassed by deranged admirers, and I found Mix's obsessive nature and his persistent conniving quite chilling at times. It was clear from the outset that something shocking was about to take place, but I have to admit that when the event did happen, I was completely taken by surprise. It wasn't at all what I'd been expecting, and having 'witnessed' the crime, so to speak, I was a little deflated. I much prefer murder mysteries where the perpetrator isn't revealed until the end, but mindful of the Christie analogy, I read on, in anticipation of further happenings.

The suspense and the growing desperation of the whole situation made for compelling enough reading, but as the story progressed I'm afraid there were far too many coincidences for my liking, and events tended to slot into place all too neatly and conveniently. It felt as though Rendell, in an effort to tie up all the loose ends, had tried just a little too hard, with the result that the story lost some of its credibility. Some aspects of the plot would have been better left to the imagination, and the explanation for Christie's 'ghost', which Mix encountered with increasing regularity throughout the book, was just plain daft, frankly. I'd have been happier believing it to have been the product of Mix's increasingly disturbed mind, which would have been more in keeping with the book's psychological and vaguely supernatural theme.

I've nitpicked a little, perhaps, possibly because as I've mentioned, this isn't my ideal type of thriller, but overall I have to admit it was a fairly gripping read. The cold, drabness of the once elegant old house is palpable, and Rendell's image of modern-day, cosmopolitan London, urban vibrancy contrasting sharply with lonely anonymity, is very well perceived. Her characterisations are masterpieces of observation too, particularly Mix, who is probably the classic loner, the kind straight off the pages of a police profiler's textbook. His simmering resentment and the notion that the world owes him a favour threatens to explode at any moment, and it's that anticipation which held my interest throughout.

With its macabre and contemporary subject matter, this book is crying out to be dramatised and given the right kind of direction, it could prove very successful. As long as they leave out the ridiculous ghost theory, that is.

Taken from http://www.ciao.co.uk/Thirteen_Steps_Down_Ruth_Rendell__Review_5560221