The Brimstone Wedding [Hardcover]

Barbara Vine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1996

Stella is a secretive, elegant, elderly lady dying of cancer. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, seems aware of Stella's mysterious past. Allowed to use Stella's house for meetings with her lover, Jenny discovers clues to Stella's past, and a dark, shocking secret is finally revealed.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A wise and unsettling tale of the power and poison of love, from the acknowledged queen of the English psychological mystery. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Once again, Ruth Rendell writing as Vine (e.g., No Night Is Too Long, Harmony, 1995) weaves a compelling tale of ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures. Two women, divided by age and class, share their deepest secrets in an English nursing home in which one cares for the other. There is a sense of secrecy from the start, as Jenny Warner tells dying Stella Newland about her love affair and Stella shares with Jenny the location of her secret house. Secrecy gives way to foreboding, and tension builds as details are masterfully revealed. Vine is an extraordinary storyteller, able to enthrall a reader right from the start, as she does here. Additionally, she provides a satisfying symmetry in the construction of this book, with the two women's alternating voices and the inextricable linking of their lives, as Stella dies and Jenny is virtually reborn. This is a marvel?may Vine write many more. Highly recommended.?Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; First Edition edition (March 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670866105
• ISBN-13: 978-0670866106
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,444,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Brimstone Wedding (Hardcover)

THE BRIMSTONE WEDDING is one of Barbara Vine's finest novels, a blend of romance, murder, mystery, and much adultery that forms a remarkably peaceful book. Once more, Vine gives us a clever and intricately developed plot and vividly drawn characters. Though the story has its dark, suspenseful moments, it has an overall calm, serene overtone, with the exception of the exciting and explosive climax, a section you'll literally plow through so quickly you won't be able to turn the pages fast enough. Finally, on the very last page, Vine demonstrates once more that few authors are so gifted at throwing in the final, sudden twist, the twist that is totally unpredictable, yet fits in logically with the plot, and makes you look back on the whole story and the characters differently. This last, spectacular twist is likely to leave the reader breathless but satisfied. A solid achievement, not quite as compelling as A DARK-ADAPTED EYE, but every bit as readable. Well done.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Atmospheric mystery of infidelity, February 3, 2004

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brimstone Wedding (Hardcover)

Driven by atmosphere and character, this novel by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, centers around two stories of infidelity and deception.

Genevieve, 32, a working-class caretaker at a private nursing home, confides her affair to her favorite patient, Stella, who is middle-class, educated, affluent and dying. Stella responds with the keys to a house none of her family knows she owns, a house no one has visited in 30 years. She asks Genevieve to report its condition.

Shocked that something so valuable could be simply abandoned -for whatever reason - Genevieve appropriates it as a trysting place, her curiosity only slightly piqued by the abandoned, burned car in the garage, the photographs hidden away, the food and champagne left in the refrigerator.

And so begins a story in tandem as Genevieve's stolen meetings alternate with Stella's story of her own doomed love. Character precipitates the events of the plot, and as we increasingly sympathize with Stella's shy dignity and Genevieve's fretful ardor, foreboding envelops the narrative like a London fog. Not to be missed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deceit Times Two, September 19, 2002

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brimstone Wedding (Paperback)

What Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) does best is make us uneasy. You can never settle right in and accept the persons and scenes quite the way they are presented. "What a lovely girl --- and yet?" is a typical reaction. In "The Brimstone Wedding" Ms. Vine is at her best, right up there with "Dark Adapted Eye." The novel is beautifully crafted, the prose spare and the atmosphere of the Fen Country in East Anglia is perfect. Because The Fens are a series of islands based in the boggy soil, the foundations are forever shifting. Nothing changes, but nothing stays exactly the same which is an excellent setting for this haunting tale.

Jenny/Genevieve Warner is a care assistant at a luxurious home for the elderly where she has built a friendship with terminally ill, exquisitely turned out Mrs. Stella Newland. Two women could not be more different on the surface. Jenny is a modern, practical, hard working country girl who has never traveled and is a product of village life and education. Stella comes from the gentry, married very well and seems so sheltered as to have come from a different age all together. Yet the sparkling Jenny's humdrum marriage is teetering because she has discovered passion in the form of a married lover. Stella has some dark secrets she has lived with for over twenty years and wants to share them with Jenny. Stella believes in nothing, but would like redemption. Jenny believes in everything: omens, charms, and every passing happenstance has psychic meaning for her. Jenny is willing to work her way to better things; Stella is passive. But why does Stella own a house that no one knows about? And why is she afraid to even ride in automobiles when she once was considered a dashing driver? Why does she refuse to sit outside in the sunshine?

The author keeps us asking these questions and sends us down some strange paths to get the answers. We know we are heading for a nameless horrific climactic event in Stella's past that will somehow impact on Jenny's present, but what can it be? Ms. Vine never falls into a Gothic romance-type of trap. Her people and events are sharp edged. Stella smokes irritably in spite of the fact she is dying of lung cancer. When Jenny finally works up her courage to leave her husband, he will not take her seriously; so what should be a grand melodramatic episode degenerates into farce. "I'm leaving you Mike"----"Well take the washer and leave the car, there's a good lass."

The author builds the tension until we are wrought up for at least a tornado strike, and she doesn't disappoint. Then when we think we have taken quite enough for one day, she adds another zinger. A great well-done page-turner.