Ruth Rendell doesn’t do bad ones so there’s not much point in claiming that this was a good one really! I don’t know how she decides which books are published as Barbara Vine and which aren’t - this seemed more like a Vine than some of her others.

Great plot revolving around twenty-something sisters Heather and Ismay, Ismay feeling she has to protect Heather who she knows killed their stepfather as a child, although she doesn’t actually know this at all. Some fabulous characters with the less than savoury ones like Marion, who tried to get the elderly to write her into their wills, being some of the best. Mostly though I like the way Rendell writes all kinds of background detail in, some of it utterly irrelevant and other bits just disguised, it’s so much more than red herrings.