No Night is Too Long is a classic crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara Vine Tim 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, suspenseful, and deeply unsettling, No Night is Too Long is a modern crime masterpiece and will be enjoyed by readers of P.D. James and Ian Rankin.'The Rendell/Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian Rankin'She deploys her peerless skills in blending the mundane, commonplace aspects of life with the murky impulses of desire and greed' Sunday TimesBarbara Vine is...

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 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. Grasshopper is a modern...

A Dark-Adapted Eye - a prize-winning crime classic by bestselling author Barbara Vine Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award 'A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel' P.D. James 'Compulsively readable ... a carefully devised plot unfolded with the most cunning art. Wilkie Collins and Dickens would have admired it' Sunday Times 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. 'Brilliantly plotted. Vine is not afraid to walk down the mean streets of the mind and can build up an almost...

King Solomon's Carpet - a prize-winning crime classic from bestselling author Barbara Vine Winner 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 Times Jarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compiling his obsessive, secret history of London's Underground. His presence and his strange house draw a band of misfits into his orbit: young Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who gets his kicks on the tube; and mysterious Axel, whose dark secret later casts a shadow over all of their lives. Dispossessed and outcast, those who come to inhabit Jarvis's schoolhouse are gradually brought closer together in violent and unforeseen ways by London's forbidding and...

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 of beginning her research, Sarah comes across the first of what will be many shocking revelations. As her life is slowly torn apart, a terrible logic finally emerges to explain her mother's remoteness, her father's need to continually reinvent himself in his work, and a long-forgotten London murder. From the Hardcover edition.

The Brimstone Wedding - a masterful mystery about love and madness by bestseller Barbara Vine 'Intriguing, absorbing and compelling' Spectator Jenny's marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at an old people's home, where she is especially fond of Stella, a gracious, dignified woman dying of cancer - whose own secrets parallel Jenny's - with the difference that she may have been involved in murdering her lover's husband . . . 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. If you enjoy the crime novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will adore this book. 'The Rendell/ Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian Rankin'A superb and...

The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine - a crime masterpiece about ambition, obsession and bad blood'An outstandingly original book' Sunday Times The current Lord Nanther, experiencing the reform of the House of Lords, embarks on a biography of his great-grandfather, the first Lord Nanther, favoured physician to Queen Victoria, expert on blood diseases and particularly the royal disease of haemophilia. What he uncovers begins to horrify him as he realizes that Nanther died a guilty man - carrying a horrific secret to the grave. Weaving effortlessly between past and present, public life and private life, The Blood Doctoris a superbly satisfying novel that will be adored by readers of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow. 'A magnificent novel' Daily Mail 'Intriguing and absorbing and wholly satisfying' Spectator'Plotted with a jeweller's intricacy and ominous...

Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway.Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own...