Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway. Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own... ‘A work of great originality…harks back to the Golden Age whodunit’ Daily Mail ‘Chilling psychological drama…a classic formula…but a surprising twist’ Sunday Times ‘Few British writers can concoct pricklier slow-burning thrillers than Ruth Rendell in her Barbara Vine guise’ Mail on Sunday ‘Truly disturbing, riveting stuff. Blurs the line between thriller suspense and complex novel. Classic Vine’ Elle ‘Our foremost woman writer’ Anita Brookner, Spectator ‘Written at every level with extraordinary assurance, subtlety and control’ Sunday Telegraph