A Dark-adapted Eye

Author: Barbara Vine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143570035
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Vera was prim and fastidious. Eden was beautiful and adored. Like most families they had their secrets...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. Yet their sisterly bond was strained by obsession, manipulation and murderous jealousy. Buried secrets rarely stay buried, and their past still wields the power to tear their family apart. The Green Popular Penguins Story It was in 1935 when Allen Lane stood on a British railway platform looking for something good to read on his journey. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor quality paperbacks. Lane's disappointment at the range of books available led him to found a company - and change the world. In 1935 the Penguin was born, but it took until the late 1940s for the Crime and Mystery series to emerge. The genre thrived in the post-war austerity of the 1940s, and reached heights of popularity by the 1960s. Suspense, compelling plots and captivating characters ensure that once again you need look no further than the Penguin logo for the scene of the perfect crime.

A Fatal Inversion

Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: [Middlesex, England] : Viking
ISBN: 9780670809776
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
Roman.

The Blood Doctor

Author: Barbara Vine
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0307428184
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
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.

Tigerlily's Orchids

Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439150397
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL'S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS Is it dangerous to know too much about your neighbors? When Stuart Font throws a housewarming party, he invites all the residents of his new building--among them, three flippant young girls, a lonely spinster, a man with a passion for classical history, and a woman determined to drink herself to death. He definitely does not want his girlfriend, Claudia, in attendance, as he would also have to invite her lawyer husband. But careful planning can only get a person so far. As it turns out, this party will be one everyone remembers. Meanwhile, living in a town house opposite Stuart's building, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman known as Tigerlily. As though from some strange urban fairy tale, she emerges infrequently to exert a terrible spell. In Tigerlily's Orchids, Ruth Rendell has written a darkly humorous and psychologically thrilling novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a London terrace--about the secrets they keep, and what they will do to hide them.

Grasshopper

Author: Barbara Vine
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0307426092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
“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.

A Demon In My View

Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409067807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Perfect for fans of PD James, Ann Cleeves and Donna Leon, this haunting insight into the mind of a pathological criminal is one of multi-million copy and SUNDAY TIMES bestselling author Ruth Rendell's most terrifying novels... 'Rendell is unrivalled at depicting psychologically warped people and at creating unease through the simplest things. This is another triumph' -- Observer 'Wonderful at exploring the dark corners of the human mind, and the way private fantasies can clash and explode into terrifying violence' -- Daily Mail 'Brilliantly written' -- ***** Reader review 'Absolutely fantastic!' -- ***** Reader review 'Mesmerizing' -- ***** Reader review 'Intensely absorbing' -- ***** Reader review ************************************************************************** Arthur Johnson doesn't look like a murderous psychopath; he is a mild-mannered man who has never known how to talk to women. Years of loneliness has warped his mind, turning his desire for a woman's love and respect into a pathological need for carefully controlled violence. Locked in the cellar of his building is the perfect willing victim, a woman who can be murdered over and over again, a woman who waits for Arthur every night...a mannequin in the form of a female. But when a young scholar of psychopathic personalities moves in downstairs and Arthur's mannequin disappears, where will he turn to satisfy his urgent craving for violence?

Asta's Book

Author: Barbara Vine
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141040459
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
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 keep 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 they 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.

Thirteen Steps Down

Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Seal Books
ISBN: 0385673183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
From the multi-award-winning author of The Babes in the Wood and The Rottweiler, a chilling new novel about obsession, superstition, and violence, set in Rendell’s darkly atmospheric London. Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an ‘S’ rather than a ‘C’) is superstitious about the number 13. In musty old St. Blaise House, where he is the lodger, there are thirteen steps down to the landing below his rooms, which he keeps spick and span. His elderly landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer, was born in St. Blaise House, and lives her life almost exclusively through her library of books, so cannot see the decay and neglect around her. The Notting Hill neighbourhood has changed radically over the last fifty years, and 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders, has been torn down. Mix is obsessed with the life of Christie and his small library is composed entirely of books on the subject. He has also developed a passion for a beautiful model who lives nearby — a woman who would not look at him twice. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix’s life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

The House of Stairs

Author: Barbara Vine
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241968844
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
The House of Stairs - an unputdownable crime classic from bestselling author Barbara Vine Lizzie 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 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 The House of Stairs is a modern masterpiece of the crime genre and will leave you gripped from the first page to the last. If you enjoy the novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love 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 original writer' Amanda Craig, Express 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.

Webvision

Author: Helga Kolb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description