For most writers, the compulsive stranger would be the centre of only a deliberately nasty book. For Ruth Rendell, he, like her previous misfits, is part of a larger life where health surges but needs defence. The setting of A Demon in my View is very prettily made: a North London lodging-house where everyone is waiting hopefully for life to change, except for the strangler, who hopes only that the girl waiting in the cellar will go on being ready to die and save him from seeking new victims. (p. 29)