best mystery I have read in quote some time. You probably know the plot, devastated young man loses his fiancée due to cruelly careless act and sets his heart on revenge. Yes , some of the language is hokey, but the plot is so well done, it actually may manage to surprise you. After reading hundreds, maybe thousands of mysteries and lots of tv and movies, I thought no one could maintain suspense and create surprise anymore. Cornell woolrich delivers
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Maybe a 3.5. The thing holding me back is the sexism, though I know this was written in the 1940s. Where a male over 18 is a "man," but females don't grow up until they're old--the eternal"girl." As a thriller, Woolrich does the formula right--constantly keeping the reader guessing. The blind stalking scene may have inspired the movie"Wait until Dark." ( )

Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich is an unusual revenge story as a young man, not certain which of five men are to blame for the death of his beloved fiancee, goes after the woman in each of their lives that they love. Johnny and Dorothy were to be married in a couple of weeks time, but one night while on the way to meet him, she is struck by a falling object and is immediately killed. Eventually it is discovered that someone threw an empty liquor bottle from a small plane, and this is what struck Dorothy down.

Revenge is all that Johnny can think of as he persistently tracks various flights until he is able to figure out which one was responsible. He finds it was a charter flight taking a group of men on a fishing trip. He strikes on May 31of every year as that was the date that Dorothy was killed. His methods are thorough and very different each time, but he always sends or leaves a note saying that now this particular man will know how it feels to lose the love of their life. One detective, Cameron, spends years trying to find the killer and to prevent him from continuing his attacks.

Cornell Woolrich’s dark stories are filled with flawed characters, and in this one, Johnny Marr turns from being an average young man into a merciless killer, twisted beyond redemption. Fans of Woolrich will recognize the plot similarities in this book to The Bride Wore Black but this wasn’t jarring enough to pull me away from the story. Even though I had to blindly accept more than a few plot absurdities I found Rendezvous in Black to be an entertaining page-turner. ( )

Great. Man's fiance is killed under a clock and he spends the next x amount of years tracking those responsible- five rendevous's with death, i believe. Thriller. ( )

It all starts with a liquor bottle tossed from a plane. Woolrich uses this seemingly insignificant incident to weave a tale of deadly consequences. While Woolrich is writing his little roman noir, he is really talking about the indifference of the cosmos to your or my fate. This tiny event will leave a consequential trail of blood engulfing the innocent and guilty equally and nobody will ever be the same again. Since it’s Woolrich we’ll get to see some psychopathology, paranoia, revenge, horror, suspense, and thrills along the way. Oh, but don’t spend too much time on the unlikelihood of some of the plot devices, that’s all part of the fun.

I dropped this one star because after the first couple of rendezvous you are going to know basically what is going to happen, just not the details. You won’t want to put it down anyway.

There is so much more going on here than the surface of the story, but that’s what good noir is about. One of the best analogies of the Butterfly Effect. ( )