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Editorial Reviews show below copied directly from Amazon.com:

,i>Writing under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell departs from her famous detective team of Wexford and Burden to tell a gripping tale of family madness. Vera Hillyard is a domineering and possessive woman who strives for obsessive control over a malicious older son, a youngest son who is--or isn't--illegitimate, and a daughter who is a devoted sister to her younger brother. The daughter secretly seeks to escape Vera's grasp and instead provokes a murder. This winner of the 1986 Edgar Award for best mystery novel belongs to the genre of old murders reconsidered and the question of who did what to whom and why is teasingly left unresolved.

Always love a Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine!

"Like most families, they had their secrets. And hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that Vera Hillward and her beautiful sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred.... so they had to fight it out behind closed curtains using every weapon they had.

"In this case, murder."

I'm not sure what to write about this novel. I did finish it, although I nearly abandoned it half-way through. I certainly didn't enjoy it as much as other Rendell/Vine novels. Somehow the action seemed very cloying, too close, too introverted to be in close-contact with for long.

I know the books that Rendell writes as Barbara Vine are generally slow family histories going back into the past, discovering hidden secrets and so on - and this book certainly gave a very intimate portrait of the family, with the true actions largely unresolved at the end. That was somewhat dissatisfying... although I suppose it mirrors real life, where often what really happened isn't ever known. I didn't think that the side story about the disappearing babies was resolved or frightfully relevant.

I don't know that this book chronicles 'family madness', but the characters of Vera, Francis, and Eden are certainly unusual and warped. It was interesting to see the surviving family members in the present day, compared to how Faith (the narrator) saw them when she was a child.

WARNING : spoiler

I think some evidence was forgotten or ignored by Vine - or perhaps left for her readers to discover - in the summing up at the end of the book - the fact that Jamie had a long gestation (over 10 months), and that Vera was seen running out of her house, very upset (pg 133) indicates to me that perhaps she *was* pregnant to Gerald, but miscarried (which would have been more likely, given her age). Then around the same time, Eden fell pregnant, and they concocted their plan. So Jamie was Eden's child after all. Maybe!