Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion (UK 1987 / 8th printing)

From the Publisher:
BY THE AUTHOR OF A DARK-ADAPTED EYE, EDGAR AWARD WINNER
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, what they are doing 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 a child are discovered in the Hall's animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child?

'No one horrifies as can Ruth Rendell. Writing under the pen-name Barbara Vine... Rendell turns an East Anglian mansion into a place of terror... In Rendell at her peak, as this book is, foreboding deters us from turning the page, while the urge to know what comes next forces us to do so. What comes last is a truly devastating pay-off' - Listener

'The story is brilliant, the ending a perfect bit of irony,... Barbara Vine has the kind of near-Victorian narrative drive... that compels a reader to go on turning the pages' - Julian Symons in the Sunday Times

'I defy anyone to guess the conclusion, but looking back, the clues are seen to be there, unobtrusively but cunningly planted, so that it seems one should have known all along. The curtain is drawn back to reveal rather than to surprise; a most satisfying end' -- Daily Telegraph

Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987, ISBN: 0140086374 (8th printing, no date given), 316 p., £3.50

Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
RUTH RENDELL, one of the greatest living practitioners of the British mystery, makes her triumphant return writing under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. With the rich complexity that is the trademark of her best work, this remarkable new novel probes deeply into the roots of evil in the lives of five people, who, responsible for a murder more than a decade before, have been hoping their crime would never be discovered.

A death at the gentle hands of a Suffolk veterinarian is what digs up the long-hidden mystery at Wyvis Hall, Nunes, Suffolk. Alec Chipstead, inspecting the grounds of his recently purchased manor house, discovers a quaintly touching and very Victorian pet cemetery. Now, grieving the loss of his aged dog, Chipstead and his wife plan to use the cemetery as a final resting place for their beloved Fred. But something grisly has already been laid to rest in the unmarked plot intended for the Chipstead beagle -- the unmistakably human bones of a woman and a child.

When businessman Adam Verne-Smith learns of the police investigation into the anonymous bones, he knows what he and a circle of intimate friends covered up at Wyvis Hall is dangerously close to being revealed. More than a decade before, a dark, desperate act occurred that has held them all in a pact of fear and silence ever since.

What happened that long summer of 1976 was something each one of them had his private reason for wanting to forget. But what was the crime? Who were the hapless victims? What twisted inroads into the hearts of Adam and his friends has guilt already made? And how chillingly far will they go to be sure their past stays dead -- and buried?

BARBARA VINE, as Ruth Rendell, has won three major awards: the Mystery Writers of America "Edgar Allen Poe" Award for THE FALLEN CURTAIN, the Crime Writers Association "Golden Dagger" for A DEMON IN MY VIEW, and CURRENT CRIME magazine's reader poll named SHAKE HANDS FOREVER as the best book of the year, over contenders such as Agatha Christie and Len Deighton. Her first book written under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine was the critically acclaimed A DARK-ADAPTED EYE, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for the best hardcover mystery of 1986.

Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion. A Novel of Suspense. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553052152 (September, 1987), 268 p., $14.95.