The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“When Ruth Rendell, already the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world, launched a second byline, Barbara Vine, she actually stepped up her writing level.”        
—Time

“This gifted author’s ability to draw us so completely into her vividly realized, guilt-ridden worlds that they seem to meld, seamlessly, with our own is what makes her one of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world.”        
–Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review

“Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine has transcended her genre by her remarkable imaginative power to explore and illuminate the dark corners of the human psyche.”        
–P. D. James

“Unequivocally the most brilliant mystery novelist of our times. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze . . . she magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.”        
–Patricia Cornwell

“Much honored around the world, but less well known here, she is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who enjoys brilliant mystery–or distinguished literature.”        
–Scott Turow