I wanted to give this tense thriller five stars. I wanted to rave about it and tell all my bookish friends to download it immediately (free, because it’s out of copyright) from Apple Books.

Instead, it gets four: the kind of four-star rating reserved for books that are often brilliant but still need to come with a qualifier.

First, though, the good stuff.

What a delicious premise.

The novel is set in the late 1880s, slap bang in ‘Jack the Ripper’ territory, although Lowndes is careful to place the events alongside the Whitechapel murders without ever claiming they are the Ripper’s work. Her version of London is instead terrorised by a slasher dubbed ‘the Avenger‘ by the newspapers. That’s actually an early nickname associated with the historical killer before that infamous letter to the press identified him for posterity.

Lowndes does a remarkable job of creating sympathy for Mr and Mrs Bunting: ordinary, luckless members of the serving class. She shifts the action from Whitechapel to her own familiar ground of Marylebone, giving the couple a little more social cachet. Here the Buntings dream of making a modest living by taking in lodgers. I was involved – pretty much cheering them on – as early as page four by the devastating observation that:

Already they had learned to go hungry, and they were beginning to learn to go cold.

As winter approaches, every avenue for borrowing has been exhausted, the pawn shop is becoming weary of seeing them, and the future looks painfully bleak – possibly short, too.

Are the Buntings especially likeable? Not really. Mrs Bunting’s snobbery and rather sour treatment of Daisy – her husband’s late-teenage daughter by his first marriage – mostly see to that. But they are devastatingly ordinary. I rather like to think they were named after the timid little songbird.

If so, then when the inevitable knock comes at the door, what enters their nest is a cold-eyed raptor.

Cue the softly spoken, mysterious, Bible-reading Mr Sleuth. With his undemanding habits, courteous manner, and healthy stash of gold sovereigns, he could be the Buntings’ salvation… or their destruction.

The questions that follow would trouble any of us.

How much should suspicion cost? What compromises become acceptable when poverty is waiting just outside the front door? Is to permit to promote?

It isn’t long before Mrs Bunting begins to suspect her lodger of, well… you know.

Lowndes turns this into a wonderfully uncomfortable moral dilemma, creating a claustrophobic, deeply unequal relationship between landlady and lodger. She (and we) know that Sleuth’s continued presence keeps the wolf from the door, even if the tiger is already inside the house.

Like the thorniest ethical problems, the gulf between what one ought to do and what one would rather do proves almost impossible to cross.

Other questions emerge too: about truth, secrecy and the stories we tell ourselves. How far should we go to spare someone we love from dreadful knowledge? In an era of fake news and algorithm-fed outrage, it was fascinating to watch the grip newspapers exert over Mr Bunting, and to reflect on our enduring appetite for sensational crime, whether consumed through penny dreadfuls, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, or Scotland Yard’s macabre Black Museum.

With these scenes, Lowndes asks us to tread the uneasy line where violence is both alluring and appalling, fascinating and deeply repellent.

It’s also impossible not to notice how modern the psychology feels. This is exactly the kind of morally compromised relationship Patricia Highsmith would later spend a career exploring. Hitchcock hovers round the edges, fine-tuning the atmosphere.

Not everything works quite so well.

Policeman Joe Chandler occasionally feels less like a detective than a stereotypical narrative convenience. His inability to connect some fairly conspicuous dots is necessary for the plot, but it sometimes stretches credibility.

That said, Lowndes is wonderfully adept at manoeuvring the reader into completing our own dot-to-dot as Daisy and the increasingly reclusive Mr Sleuth begin to encounter one another –  and just as Joe finally overcomes both his own hesitation and Mrs Bunting’s manoeuvrings to propose marriage!

So we arrive at an ending that didn’t merely disappoint me. It genuinely let me down.

More people should write book reviews. 

What a fascinating challenge it is to explain why something does or doesn’t work, without spoiling the book for everyone else.

It isn’t that the ending was unexpected.

I’m not one of those readers who spends the entire novel trying to outwit the author before feeling cheated when I fail.

I felt robbed because the resolution arrives with surprising haste. The emotional and moral tensions Lowndes spent hundreds of pages tightening seemed to unravel almost at once. It felt less like a carefully judged conclusion than an author suddenly remembering she’d left something in the oven while her characters were still wandering around Madame Tussaud’s.

In fact, I’ll go further. If the ending were better, I think the novel would be up there with classics of the genre.

If you read for the journey rather than the destination, though, there’s still a tremendous amount to enjoy. I certainly did: for the lovely ambiguity of ‘Ripper but not Ripper-Lit’; for a London I never tire of visiting as a Sherlock Holmes reader; for memorable characters; and, above all, for the questions the novel left rattling around my head after I’d finished it.

The book is a good one. I’ve already downloaded another Lowndes novel, ‘The Chink in the Armour’ (also free, this time courtesy of Project Gutenberg – link). Four stars is still an enthusiastic recommendation in my world. It simply means I feel morally obliged to point out that, if this were a second-hand car I was selling, the exhaust needs looking at, and the rear wiper is missing its rubber blade.

Join the conversation.

Have you read ‘The Lodger‘? If so, I want to hear what you thought of it.

If not, here’s a broader question:

Which great novel has the most disappointing ending?

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Related Reads: if this left you thinking…

…about ordinary people meeting extraordinary evil…

→ Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950)

…about why murder fascinates us…

→ Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

…about respectable London hiding dangerous secrets…

→ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)

…about monsters behind ordinary faces…

→ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

…about curiosity becoming corruption…

→ Stephen King, ‘Apt Pupil’, in Different Seasons (1982) 

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