The Minotaur - Barbara Vine

"The Minotaur" is the twelfth and most recent novel by Barbara Vine, who is, of course, the alter ego of the highly successful crime novelist Ruth Rendell. The Vine novels are, I think, intended to be the darker, more psychological, less crime-genre side of Rendell's writing, giving her the opportunity to branch out in new directions… although to be honest, I'm not convinced they are really all that much different from the (non-Wexford) novels she writes under her own name. The story is narrated by Kerstin Kvist, who as a young woman in the late 1960s comes from Sweden to the Essex countryside in order to work for the Cosway family; ostensibly, as a ...  Read the complete review