The Minotaur [Paperback]

Barbara Vine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2007

From the author Time magazine calls “the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world,” comes an elegant and gripping new novel that blurs the line between psychological suspense and Gothic horror. Kerstin Krist arrives at the vine-covered Lydstep Old Hall in rural Essex to care for John Cosway, a former mathematical genius, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and kept under heavy sedation. John is the sole heir of the immense Cosway estate. As he takes his daily walks or sits quivering in a labyrinthine library, the rest of the family plots their own ways of coming into the fortune. It is classic Barbara Vine–an absolutely enthralling tale that keeps turning and twisting until the very last page.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British master Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) explores life among the Cosways, a country gentry clan that makes the Wuthering Heights crowd look wholesome. Kerstin Kvist, a young Swedish nurse, takes a job at Lydstep Old Hall caring for John Cosway, a mathematical prodigy now labeled by his family as schizophrenic. In addition to John, there are four obsessive sisters ruled by their scarecrow-like matriarch. Gradually, Kerstin suspects that John is being drugged so that his mother and sisters can remain in their estate under the terms of a disputed trust. Vine creates a family and village, Windrose, so vivid you're tempted to book a B and B and investigate things yourself. Some scenes involving John's behavior—his fits and his family's reactions—seem abrupt to the point of being bizarre, but Vine is describing a man hijacked from rationality, through a narrator whose first language isn't English. When murder finally happens, it's simultaneously shocking yet inevitable. Though less elegantly written than 2002's The Blood Doctor, this delivers a more palpable, and thus satisfying, crime. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Barbara Vine is the pen name of Ruth Rendell. It's odd to think that such an acclaimed and public figure as Rendell (who has won almost every mystery award in the genre) would assume a pen name, until you notice the differences in the novels appearing under the Rendell and Vine names. Rendell writes precision mysteries, as spare and gaunt as an iron fence. But Vine is Rendell's exuberant other half. Vine thrillers are almost rococo in the expanse of plot and character, skirting close to self-indulgence at times. In the latest Vine, a Swedish nurse named Kirstin Kvist looks back at the central mystery of her life, something that happened back in the 1960s, when she journeyed to crumbling Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, England, to care for a melancholy 39-year-old man with a puzzling ailment. The tale starts as a medical mystery, with Kvist trying to determine what is wrong with the heir to the family fortune. It segues into a Victorian novel of manners when Kvist discovers a plot to wrest the fortune away, a plot that predictably leads to murder. This is very satisfying reading, a sort of blend of Edgar Allan Poe and Anthony Trollope. Readers of both Rendell and Vine will love this expansive excursion. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307278328
• ISBN-13: 978-0307278326
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All The Rendell/VIne Characteristics, But Not The Best Of Her Work, April 4, 2006

By 

John D. Cofield - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Minotaur: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Minotaur is the latest production by Ruth Rendell under her alter ego of Barbara Vine. The Vine novels concentrate on "why" rather than "who" or "how" in exploring the psychological reasons for crimes which take place in the past and are slowly revealed to the reader by narrators who witnessed some or all of the events. At Vine's best, as in her first two novels A Dark Adapted Eye and A Fatal Inversion, this technique produces an engrossing read which is difficult to put down and leaves one with much to ponder.

Unfortunately The Minotaur, while satisfying, is not on the same level as Vine's earliest work. This book contains many of Vine/Rendell's signature plot elements: a character from Scandinavia, a dysfunctional family, psychologically disturbed individuals, other individuals who are autistic, and an East Anglian setting with one or more old houses covered in Virginia creeper. In The Minotaur these characters and settings aren't as well developed and tend to be more stereotypical than illuminating. The story also doesn't jump back and forth from the past to the present quite as much as other Vine works do. Some readers might like that, but one of the things I myself find most appealing about Vine is that shift from time period to time period.

Despite these disappointments, I did enjoy The Minotaur. It is a satisfying little mystery which in typical British fashion leaves much unsaid and the reader with much to sort out for himself. I also liked the glimpses back to British life in the late 1960s and the comparisons with life thirty five years or so on.

I recommend The Minotaur unreservedly for Vine/Rendell veterans. If you are just discovering Barbara Vine, you will get a more developed introduction to her work by first reading the two books I mentioned above or by reading some similar in spirit Rendell works like The Crocodile Bird or A Sight For Sore Eyes.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In the House of Murdoch, March 29, 2007

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Minotaur (Paperback)

Ruth Rendell's latest novel under her other name, Barbara Vine, is one of her best efforts to date. As with all the books under the Vine name, the question here is not so much whodunnit as how did something awful come to happen: in this case, we know that the heroine, Kerstin Kvist, went to an Essex manor house called Lydstep Old Hall in the Sixties to help care for a disturbed adult man who libes with his arrogant old mother and four slightly unhinger sisters, and that something awful happened while she was there. We spend the rest of the novel waiting to find out what exactly happened.

This is Vine's most Gothic novel in quite some time, and though the gigantic Virginia creeper-entwined Lydstep Old Hall reminds the heroine of Brontë and Du Maurier, the novelist whose work this novel seems really closest to is Iris Murdoch. The Cosways, with their unusual first names, short tempers, love of sex and high-handed behavior, seem to recall the Britons from Murdoch's novels, and the novel's fine sense of place will call to mind some of Murdoch's most striking books from the early 60s like THE TIME OF THE ANGELS and THE UNICORN. The characterization is quite strong, although the character of Ida Cosway never comes as fully to life as those of her sisters, and the intelligent narrator's inertia when faced with the Cosways' rude behavior to her is often hard to believe (although Vine keeps trying to explain it to us). The other characters, however, are quite intriguing, particularly the Minotaur himself, John Cosway.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine maze you got me into!, August 4, 2005

By 

Cielledee "cielledee" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Minotaur (Audio CD) (Audio CD)

This is a very compelling read narrated by the story's protagonist, Kerstin Kvist who is working in England. The story takes place in rural England in the 60s, a village that has not been touched the 'revolution' sweeping other parts of the country. Kerstin is employed by a dysfunctional and sinister family made up of the tyrannical mother, four sisters and one brother who is supposedly mad. Family secrets threaten to spill over onto everyone that knows them, including Kerstin, making for a very dramatic ending. Barbara Vine has carefully constructed a tale that absorbs, twists, entangles and finally leaves you wishing for more. Her characters are psychologically profiled and one can almost feel the goosebumps, not knowing what to expect. More please, Barbara (aka Ruth Rendell)!