Once again, Rendell portrays what seems to others a quite ordinary woman as the violent psychopath that circumstances encourage. While Rendell's kernel idea, that a person's inability to read, the limits of the world thus caused, the shame it brings her, the desperate need to hide her inability, defines her life and her final fate, is a bit of a stretch, she is completely convincing in developing it in a step-by-step progression to what then seems inevitable. The main character's very ordinariness is what makes the story so horrible. It is a provocative idea, skillfully executed.