A classic of the crime genre, A Fatal Inversion plunges you into the darker side of humanity with a plot that will keep you guessing throughout! 'An absolute winner . . . a gripping read from start to end' Daily Mail 'Brilliant. Vine has the kind of near-Victorian narrative drive' Sunday Times 'I defy anyone to guess the conclusion' Daily Telegraph ***** In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young adults camp in Wyvis Hall, a beautiful Suffolk country house, after one of them unexpectedly inherits it. Revelling in their self-indulgent, irresponsible paradise, they scavenge, steal and sell heirlooms - to entertain and simply exist. Ten years later, when the current owner buries their beloved dog in the Hall's animal cemetery, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered. But which woman? And whose child? As the facts slowly emerge, their past begins to catch up with them . . . Written under Ruth Rendell's pen name, Barbara Vine, if you enjoy the novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves, you will love this book. ***** 'One of the best Barbara Vine novels' Goodreads Review 'Not an ordinary mystery . . . it is compelling and certainly thought-provoking' Goodreads Review 'Vine is expert at the slow disclosure of facts and feelings' Goodreads Review

Asta's Book is a classic double-detective story by crime master Barbara Vine For a good, absorbing, well-told story, you could hardly better the unveiling of Asta's secret' Sunday Times It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before. 'A dazzling domestic thriller' Guardian 'Obsessively readable' Sunday Telegraph 'Engrossing . . . a mixture of biography, true crime and romance people with vivid minor players and red with herrings' Independent on Sunday 'Absolutely enthralling ... the best yet from the Vine/Rendell bureau. Essential reading' Literary Review 'Simply put, Vine is one of the greatest writers ever' Scott Turow Asta's Bookis a modern crime masterpiece and will be enjoyed by readers of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow. Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.

'A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel' P.D. James The prize-winning classic that 'changed the thriller landscape', with a new foreword from Val McDermid. VERA HILLYARD. AUNT. MOTHER. MURDERESS. Faith Severn's life has long been overshadowed by the mystery surrounding her aunt. A respectable woman who committed a crime so terrible she was hung for it. Now, the time has come to piece her story together. What secret caused two devoted sisters to turn from love to hate? And was Vera born a killer. . .Or was she driven to it? 'Brilliantly plotted. Vine is not afraid to walk down the mean streets of the mind and can build up an almost tangible atmosphere of menace and unease' Daily Telegraph 'Will linger in your memory long after you have closed the book. A first-rate novel' Washington Post A Dark-Adapted Eye is a modern classic. If you enjoy the crime novels of P.D. James and Ian Rankin you will love this book. Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.

‘This is the third psychological thriller by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine and when I say it surpasses the first two that’s really saying something ... Vine has not only produced a quietly smouldering suspense novel but also presents an accurately atmospheric portrayal of London in the heady 60’s. Literally unputdownable’ - Time Out

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Writing as Barbara Vine, Britain's preeminent mystery novelist Ruth Rendell crafts literary suspense of the highest order. With this richly textured and utterly absorbing page-tumer, Vine adds to her growing reputation as one of the great writers of our time.

Bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Gerald Candless dies suddenly, and leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, his daughter Sarah puts aside her university studies and agrees to write a biography of her famous father. But as she begins her research and pulls back the veil of his past, her life is slowly torn apart: a terrible logic begins to unfold that explains her mother's remoteness, her father's need to continually reinvent himself -- and sheds shocking light on a long-forgotten London murder.

“They have sent me here because of what happened on the pylon.”
When Clodagh Brown writes these words at the age of nineteen, she believes that she is leaving behind the traumatic events of her youth. But Clodagh soon learns that you can never entirely escape your past.

In the aftermath of the incident on the pylon--one of the great electrified structures that dot the English countryside like so many gargantuan grasshoppers--Clodagh goes off to university, moves into a basement flat arranged by her unsympathetic family, and finds freedom trekking across London's rooftops with a gang of neighborhood misfits. As she begins a thrilling relationship with a fellow climber, however, both Clodagh and the reader are haunted by the memory of the pylon and of the terrible thing that happened there--and by the eerie sense that another tragedy is just a footfall away.

Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat and a meaningless existence in the city. Then she meets the inhabitants of the top floor of 15 Russia Road. Charismatic Silver, brutal Johnny, paranoid Liv and exotic Wim range across a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, unseen by the ordinary inhabitants, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted for two years by the accident on the pylon, finds that running the roofs with these fascinating misfits brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet …

Unlike the other elderly residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart, elegant and in control. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, guesses at the mystery in Stella's past.

As the two women share secrets, Jenny is intrigued by the relics of a long-ago love affair, and gradually pieces together an account of a shocking tragedy.

The Child's Child is the new crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara Vine, pen-name for the late bestselling author Ruth Rendell What sort of betrayal would drive a brother and sister apart? When Grace and her brother Andrew inherit their grandmother's house in Hampstead, they decide to move in together. It seems the obvious thing to do: they've always got on well, the house is large enough to split down the middle, and neither of them likes partying or loud music. There's one thing they've forgotten though: what if one of them wants to bring a lover into the house? When Andrew's partner James moves in, it alters the balance - with almost fatal consequences. Barbara Vine's is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, and The Child's Child is the first book she has published under that name since The Birthday Present in 2008. It's an intriguing examination of betrayal in families, and of those two once-unmentionable subjects, illegitimacy and homosexuality. A taut, thrilling read, it will be enjoyed by readers of P.D. James and Ian Rankin. 'Cracking stuff. The Vine continues to flourish . . . (A) miracle of storytelling with her customary aplomb and cool composure' Express on The Child's Child 'The Rendell/Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian Rankin Ruth rendall has published fourteen novels under the Vine name, two of which, Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet, won the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Also available in Penguin by Barbara Vine: The Minotaur, The Blood Doctor, Grasshopper, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, The Brimstone Wedding, No Night is Too Long, Asta's Book, King Solomon's Carpet, Gallowglass, The House of Stairs, A Dark-Adapted Eye.

When Sandor snatched little Joe from the path of a London Tube train, he was quick to make clear the terms of the rescue. ‘I saved your life’, he told the homeless youngster, ‘so your life belongs to me now’.

Sandor began to tell him a fairy-tale: an ageing prince, a kidnapped princess chained by one ankle, a missed rendezvous. But what did this mysterious story have to do with Sandor’s preparations? Joe had only under-stood his own role: he was a gallowglass, the servant of a Chief…

Sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. For when biographer Martin Nanther looks into the life of his famous great-grandfather Henry, Queen Victoria’s favorite physician, he discovers some rather unsettling coincidences, like the fact that the doctor married the sister of his recently murdered fiancée. The more Martin researches his distant relative, the more fascinated—and horrified—he becomes. Why did people have a habit of dying around his great grandfather? And what did his late daughter mean when she wrote that he’s done “monstrous, quite appalling things”?

Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell) deftly weaves this story of an eminent Victorian with a modern yarn about the embattled biographer, who is watching the House of Lords prepare to annul membership for hereditary peers and thus strip him of his position. Themes of fate and family snake throughout this teasing psychological suspense, a typically chilling tale from a master of the genre.

The award-winning author and acclaimed mistress of suspense delves deeply into the heart of a family to uncover the circumstances that lead to murder more than thirty years ago. The story of a family's long-buried secret past is revealed--and the deadly consequences. Mystery Guild Selection. Doubleday Alternate.

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy - a classic crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara Vine 'Gripping, almost impossible to put down' Guardian 'One of the most frightening novels I have ever read ... Gerald Candless, the monster at the heart of the maze, is a marvellous creation' Amanda Craig, Express on Sunday When successful author Gerald Candless dies of a sudden heart attack, his eldest, adoring daughter Sarah embarks on a memoir of him and soon discovers that her perfect father was not all he appeared to be. That in fact he wasn't Gerald Candless at all. But then, who was he? And what terrible secret had driven him to live a lie for all those years? 'So ingeniously constructed, its truth and falsehoods are so deftly and convincingly interwoven, that its solution ... is as jolting as a flash of lightning' Sunday Times 'About the power of taboos, transgressions, guilts, deceptions, horrors, atonements, upsets and upheavals ... gripping' Independent If you enjoy the crime novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love The Chimney Sweeper's Boy. Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.