Barbara Vine Books In Order

A Dark-Adapted Eye

Like most families they had their secrets. And they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors, even murder. ‘A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel’ P. D. James.

A Fatal Inversion

In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping in Wyvis Hall. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there or how they are to live; they scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. In short, they exist. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child? ‘I defy anyone to guess the conclusion! The clues are cunningly planted, so that it seems one should have known all along. A most satisfying end’ ‘Daily Telegraph’.

Gallowglass

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 understood his own role: he was a Gallowglass, the servant of a Chief…
‘ On one level this is a novel about kidnapping. On another its concerns are obsession, the destructive nature of romantic illusions, and love. As Ms Vine unfolds it nothing is quite what it seems’ ‘Guardian’.

King Solomon’s Carpet

Eccentric Jarvis lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives. Damaged, dispossessed, outcasts, they are brought together in violent and unforeseen ways by London’s dark and dangerous underground system.

Asta’s Book

Mystery author, Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine evokes the life of Anna, a young Danish immigrant in turn of the century London, as she confides her rebellious thoughts to her diary. Years later Anna’s granddaughter stumbles upon missing portions of the diary that may provide the answer to an unsolved murder: the stabbing of a woman and the disappearance of her daughter. Ricocheting between diary passages and Anne’s search into the lives of her mother and grandmother, the reader learns the truth about the women in Anne’s past. Actress Wanda McCaddon reads this engrossing story within a story. 2 cassettes.

No Night Is Too Long

The author of Anna’s Book who was hailed as ‘one of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English speaking world’ by the New York Times Book Review has written a relentlessly compelling tale of sexual obsession, mistaken identity, and murder. Tim thought he’d gotten away with it. For months after the murder off the Alaskan coast he’d heard not a word. No policeman at his door asking questions. Nothing. And then the letters began. At first they seemed almost innocuous accounts of historical events. But a common theme emerged quickly. It was particularly germane to Tim, and it related directly to murder. In No Night Is Too Long, Barbara Vine has written a tour de force, rich in characters and setting, a remarkable novel by an internationally celebrated master of her craft. To research the book, the author and her husband embarked on a boat trip from Seattle up the Alaskan coast. The stark beauty of that experience provides No Night Is Too Long with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. The novel’s exploration of sexual identity and guilt represents a departure for Vine. Its resolution as always is a stunning surprise.

The Brimstone Wedding

Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only her friend Jenny knows that Stella harbors a dark secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. Over time, certain questions arise for Jenny: Why has Stella kept possession of a house and the terrible secret that even her family doesn’t know about? And will Jenny be able to persuade Stella to reveal the shocking truth of her past?

The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy

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.

Grasshopper

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 baseme*nt 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.

The Blood Doctor

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 fianc e. 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.

Minotaur

Kerstin Kvist didn’t quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand home, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. The family turned out to be even odder than the house: the widowed Mrs Cosway lived with her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady. A mysterious fourth daughter a widow herself and apparently quite rich came and went, with ill disguised contempt for the others. More puzzling still was Mrs Cosway’s son, John, a sad, self absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. There’s madness in the family’ offered one of the daughters by way of explanation, but Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn’t right to be administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John. Barbara Vine’s new book, her twelfth, is compelling in its depiction of the sex, lies and secrets within an apparently respectable family, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn’t quite reached rural England.

Birthday Present

Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter a beautiful, leggy, married woman named Hebe the two become lovers obsessed with their trysts, spiced up by what the newspapers like to call adventure sex.

It’s the dress up and role play that inspire Ivor to create a surprise Birthday Present for his beloved that involves a curbside kidnapping. It s all intended as mock dangerous foreplay, but then things take a dark turn.

After things go horribly wrong, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal astonishingly speci c details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered and his political future from being destroyed by scandal.

Like a heretic on the inquisitor s rack, Ivor is not to be spared the exquisitely slow and tortuous unfolding of events, as hints, nuances, and small revelations lay his darkest secrets hideously bare for all the world to see.

The Birthday Present is a deft, insightful, and compulsively readable exploration of obsessive desire and the dark twists of fate that can shake the lives of even those most insulated by privilege, sophistication, and power.