[The Face of Trespass] is the story of Gray, a failed writer and nearly alienated man, sick with infatuation for a corrupt, rich, married girl, whom he dare not see for fear of her terrible demands. Ruth Rendell conveys the derelict half-dream, half-nightmare life Gray is leading in an Essex hovel far better than a crime-writer need, and through this, and his sad, unsatisfied love for a dog and for his ridiculous French stepfather, makes credible the blindness that allows him to be led to total disaster—or, rather, to disaster that would have been total had it not been for the conventional crime-writer's beginning and end.