Book description
The Child's Child
is the new crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author
Barbara Vine
What 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.
There's just one thing they've not taken into account though. What
if one of them wants to bring a lover to the house? When Andrew's
partner James moves in, and immediately picks a fight about the
treatment of gay men, the balance is altered - with almost fatal consequences.
Barbara Vine's is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, and The Child's
Child is the first book she has published under that name since
The Birthday Present in 2008. It's an intriguing examination
of betrayal in families, and of those two once-unmentionable subjects,
illegitimacy and homosexuality. A taut, thrilling read, it 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.
Ruth rendall has published fourteen novels under the Vine name, two
of which, Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet, won
the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Also
available in Penguin by Barbara Vine: The Minotaur, The
Blood Doctor, Grasshopper, The Chimney Sweeper's
Boy, The Brimstone Wedding, No Night is Too Long,
Asta's Book, King Solomon's Carpet,
Gallowglass, The House of Stairs, A Dark-Adapted Eye.
Barbara Vine is the pen-name of bestselling crime writer Ruth
Rendell. This is the fourteenth novel written under the Vine name. Ruth
Rendell sits in the House of Lords as a Labour peer, and lives in Essex
and in Maida Vale, London.
