Synopsis:
Hired to be an au pair to a schizophrenic man, a Swedish girl watches as interfamilial tensions come to a boiling point, with deadly results.
Review:
Barbara Vine (the alter ego of best-selling crime novelist Ruth Rendell) has carved out a niche as deft portrayer of tightly interwoven groups of people who are all set to go [...]

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Synopsis:
Accused of murdering her family’s benefactor, a teenage girl caught in the legal system explains what led to her arrest and indictment.
Review:
Author Shannon Cowan has done a remarkable job researching the Canadian legal system viz. young adults around the time that Tin Angel takes place (late 1960s). However, the emotional component of the story [...]

Popularity: 42% [?]

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Synopsis:
A long ago summer idyll at a manor-turned-commune ended in tragedy, and the recent discovery of the bones of a woman and a baby threaten the secrets carefully guarded by the young man who inherited the home.
Review:
It may be a lesser Barbara Vine, but A Fatal Inversion is still an above average read.
Popularity: 55% [?]

Popularity: 55% [?]

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Synopsis:
Trapped in a coffin, popular teen Cass McBride works to find a strategy to reach freedom, even as the police trace down dead lead after dead lead.
Popularity: 47% [?]

Popularity: 47% [?]

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Synopsis:
After a supremely sheltered childhood, a young woman finds herself without her mother for the first time in her life, and tells her new lover the story of the crime that led to her emancipation.
Popularity: 56% [?]

Popularity: 56% [?]

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Synopsis:
After she befriends secretive An-Ling, a menopausal wife and mother’s family collapses under the weight of a lifetime of lies that may have lead to An-Ling’s murder.
Popularity: 58% [?]

Popularity: 58% [?]

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Synopsis:
A woman haunted by the uncertain onset of a genetic disease sees a woman from her past, and struggles to fill in the gaps between truth and lies from a time in her life marked by violence and murder.
Review:
House of Stairs is yet another knockout from Barbara Vine, the British crime writer who pens the [...]

Popularity: 66% [?]

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Synopsis:
Entranced by the folk tales of an old mountain man, and repulsed by the same man’s grisly crimes, Redmond Hatch struggles to narrate the events which led him to bring his beloved wife and daughter to winterwood.
Review:
I was upset by the way Winterwood seduced me. I did not want to be reeled in [...]

Popularity: 100% [?]

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Synopsis:
After the death of the tortured aunt who edited her grandmother’s best-selling diaries, a second-generation Danish-British woman seeks to find out the truth of her aunt’s parentage, which may be linked to an infamous murder case.
Review:
The complexity of Anna’s Book (originally published as Asta’s Book) is reminiscent of A Dark-Adapted Eye, and both books are [...]

Popularity: 68% [?]

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Synopsis:
An illiterate housekeeper’s resentment of the privileged family she serves boils over into a murderous rage.
Review:
Judgement in Stone was turned into an incredible movie called La Ceremonie by Claude Chabrol, starring Sandrine Bonnaire as Eunice, the “stone” of the title, and the marvelous Isabelle Huppert as Joan, the local postmistress who fans the flames of [...]

Popularity: 56% [?]

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