New Releases by Barbara Vine

From "unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time" (Patricia Cornwell), a new novel from Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, about a brother and sister involved with the same man in contemporary London.

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 specific 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. From the Hardcover edition.

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.

“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.

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.

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 or sits quivering in a labyrinthine library, the rest of the family plots their own ways of coming into the fortune. It is classic Barbara Vine–an absolutely enthralling tale that keeps turning and twisting until the very last page.

As Sarah researches her famous father's past for her memoir, shocking secrets come to light and threaten her world.

Londra metrosunda gelişen olayları konu alan polisiye-gerilim romanı.

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.

Nur die Altenpflegerin Jenny scheint zu ahnen, was hinter dem Geheimnis ihrer Patientin Stella steckt. In dem merkwürdigen alten Haus, das sie von Stella erbt, stösst sie auf Indizien, die auf einen Mord hindeuten.

In a tale of sexual obsession, mistaken identity, and murder, Tim believes that he has gotten away with murder for months after his crime, until a series of seemingly innocuous but ominous letters begins to arrive.

The memoirs of a young Danish woman living in London at the turn of the century are published to huge commercial success. Many years later, the woman's granddaughter discovers that one entry has been cut out of the original journals--an entry that may shed light on an unsolved multiple murder.

Sandor is a masterful storyteller, and Little Joe is eager to listen. As Sandor weaves his spell of words, the darkness surrounding them becomes too much for them and for the beautiful ex-model held in a Suffolk mansion by an obsessive husband.

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