King Solomon's Carpet - a prize-winning crime classic from bestselling author Barbara VineWinner of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award'The tension grows ... an overwhelming sense of foreboding ... when the unravelling takes place, it is brilliantly unexpected and original' The TimesJarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compiling his obsessive, secret history of London's Underground. His presence and ...

A GRIPPING, PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER PACKED WITH MENACE. IF YOU LIKE P.D. JAMES, IAN RANKIN AND SCOTT TUROW, YOU WILL LOVE THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT.'Intensely imagined, fearful and satisfying' Sunday TimesTory MP Ivor Tesham has unconventional tastes. And in bored housewife Hebe Furnal he finds someone to share and enact his sexual fantasies. However, one day it all goes terribly wrong.Ivor plans a speci...

Jarvis lets out rooms in the rambling old house he owns in London. When Axel-the enigma who hates London's underground tube, yet spends his free time riding it-moves in, Jarvis' diverse tenants are joined together in a disturbing nightmare.

An unforgettable tale of mystery and obsession by Barbara Vine (pseudonym of Ruth Rendell, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement)This is the utterly absorbing story of best-selling novelist Gerald Candless, whose sudden death from a heart attack leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, one of his daughters, Sarah, decides to write a biography of her internationally celebrated father.Within hours ...

Both a finely crafted mystery and a disturbingly honest depiction of the kinship between love and madness, The Brimstone Wedding tells an unsettling story about the power and the poison of love. A gracious, dignified woman, who's dying in an English nursing home, reveals the secrets of her erotic past to her young caretaker.

No Night is Too Long is a classic crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara VineTim Cornish thought he'd gotten away with murder. For months after he'd killed his lover off the Alaskan coast, there hadn't been a word. But then the letters started to arrive. It seems that someone knows what Tim has done . . .This compelling thriller delivers such a dark picture of romantic love that murder seems its natural mate. Frightening, suspense...

Grasshopper is an enthralling, chilling novel by the bestselling queen of crime Barbara Vine'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 - a gargantuan electrified grasshopper - Clodagh goes o...

The Child's Child is the new crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara Vine, pen-name for the late bestselling author Ruth RendellWhat sort of betrayal would drive a brother and sister apart?When Grace and her brother Andrew inherit their grandmother's house, they surprise few people by deciding to move in together. But they've always got on well and the London house is large enough to split down the middle.T...

The House of Stairs - an unputdownable crime classic from bestselling author Barbara VineLizzie hasn't seen her old friend, Bell, for some fourteen years, but when she spots her from a taxi in a London street she jumps out and pursues her despite 'all the terrible things' that passed between them. As Lizzie reveals those events, little by little, the women rekindle their friendship, with terrifying results ...'This is the third psychological thriller by Ruth Rendel...

“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 basemen...

From the author Time magazine calls “the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world,” comes an elegant and gripping new novel that blurs the line between psychological suspense and Gothic horror. Kerstin Krist arrives at the vine-covered Lydstep Old Hall in rural Essex to care for John Cosway, a former mathematical genius, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and kept under heavy sedation. John is the sole heir of the immense Cosway estate. As he takes his daily walks ...

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 d...