Fab. I forget how much I like Rendell when she’s writing as Vine. This is deceptively simple; nothing much seems to be happening for ages and ages, but it hooks you in and you can’t put it down.

Kerstin is apparently pronounced something like “Shashtin” in Swedish, something I didn’t know. It’s the narrators name here. She’s engaged as a nurse to the grown up, apparently schizophrenic, son of a rather odd family in the late 1960s. Rather odd family, rather good book.