Under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell has written a series of psychological thrillers which are distinguished by the subtlety with which they draw readers into tangled webs of love, guilt and remorse. They deftly probe the complex, volatile relationships that exist among families and friends, or between members of small communities, they are simply but highly effectively told and, in their quiet power and ability to resonate disturbingly in the reader's mind, share something with the work of Patricia Highsmith. Often their plots revolve around the slow revelation of secrets from the past or the gradual emergence of the truth about an individual's history and character from the lies and deceit in which he or she has sought to cloak them.

In A Fatal Inversion, the first book published under the pseudonym, all the qualities which have made the Barbara Vine novels so powerful, were already in place. A couple who have recently moved into a Suffolk country house unearth bones in the pets' cemetery kept by earlier owners which belong to no dog or cat or guinea pig. The skeletons they find are those of a young woman and a very young baby. When news of the discovery hits the morning papers, there are several people who stir uneasily in their chairs at breakfast. Ten years earlier, in 1976, Adam Verne-Smith was a young student who had unexpectedly inherited the country house from a great-uncle. Together with a close friend, a medical student named Rufus Fletcher, and a small group of waifs and strays they had picked up, Adam had spent the long, hot summer that year living in the house. An apparent idyll of sunbathing, sex and winebibbing had turned into a catastrophe which all present had long believed was forgotten. The discovery of the bodies threatens to bring it all to light. The skill with which Rendell/Vine marshals her plot is remarkable. Readers know that something terrible happened in that summer of 1976 but, as details are gradually and tantalizingly revealed bit by bit and the truth is slowly approached, the tension in the narrative builds to almost unbearable levels. The ironic conclusion, that manages to be both long-expected and utterly surprising at the same time, is a fitting ending to a magnificently suspenseful novel.

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