The Minotaur, Barbara Vine
The Minotaur, Barbara Vine
1 Rating(s)
List: $22.86 | Sale: $16.00
Club: $11.43

The Minotaur

Author: Barbara Vine

Narrator: Rosalyn Landor

Unabridged: 12 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/21/2006


Synopsis

As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel. A young nurse fresh out of school, Kerstin has been hired for a position with the Cosway family, residents of the Hall for generations. She is soon introduced to her “charge,” John Cosway, a thirty-nine-year-old man whose strange behavior is vaguely explained by his mother and sisters as part of the madness that runs in the family.

Weeks go by at Lydstep with little to mark the passage of time beyond John’s daily walks and the amusingly provincial happenings that engross the Cosway women, and Kerstin occupies her many free hours at the Hall reading or making entries into her diary. Meanwhile, bitter wrangling among Julia Cosway and her four grown daughters becomes increasingly evident. But this is just the most obvious of the tensions that charge the old remote estate, with its sealed rooms full of mystery. Soon Kerstin will find herself in possession of knowledge she will wish she’d never attained, secrets that will propel the occupants of Lydstep Old Hall headlong into sexual obsession, betrayal, and, finally, murder.

Also available in a Random House Large Print edition and as an eBook

About The Author

Barbara Vine is the author of such acclaimed novels as A Dark-Adapted EyeAnna's BookGrasshopper, and The Blood Doctor. She has won many awards for literary accomplishment, including three Edgar Awards and four Gold Daggers.Rosalyn Landor is an English-born television, theater, and multiple-award-winning audiobook narrator. Her television credits include Love in a Cold ClimateRumpole of the BaileySherlock Holmes, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has won numerous Audie awards and AudioFile magazine Earphones awards.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bionic Jean on November 14, 2024

Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for the author Ruth Rendell, and under this nom de plume she publishes novels of psychological suspense. This one, The Minotaur, published in 2005, also has elements of modern Gothic horror. It was possibly written as a homage to traditional Gothic mystery stories. The st......more

Goodreads review by Blair on January 12, 2015

I really had no idea what to read first in 2015. I actually felt like I had the reader's equivalent of writer's block, especially when reading others' blog posts and tweets about how the first book of the year should be some significant, symbolic choice that would set the tone for the year to come.......more

Goodreads review by Misha on May 29, 2021

I will start by admitting that I am a shameless Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell fan-girl. If you find me gushing about her books non-stop , please bear with me . Between the ages of 14-16 I was addicted to mysteries by Agatha Christie, P.D James and Elizabeth George. Then I discovered Ruth Rendell and the......more

Goodreads review by Jess on May 23, 2016

Kerstin arrives in a little English town to assist a family to care for their mentally ill son/brother. When she arrives, she realises that something is not right. John, the man she is meant to be looking after is not quite what he seems. What follows is a "modern" day gothic novel set in the 1960s,......more

Goodreads review by Ruthiella on March 20, 2020

I wonder if Tana French has read Barbara Vine? This is the second standalone written under Ruth Rendell’s penname that I have read and I think there are similarities between French and Vine novels in pacing and style; particularly in the emphasis of character development over plot development. I real......more


Quotes

“One of the most remarkable novelists of her generation.” —People

“The best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.” —Time

“My dream writer. Her crime studies are subtle, mysterious affairs that never turn out quite the way you anticipate. Her characters have secret, often ugly depths that make them strangers with uncomfortably familiar features. And her prose style, so intricate in design and supple in execution, has the disquieting intimacy of an alien touch in the dark.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

“Surely one of the greatest novelists presently at work in our language.” —Scott Turow

“Those who haven’t read her books have missed something unique and wonderful.” —Tony Hillerman

“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 writer of our time. She magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.” —Patricia Cornwell

“Her clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.” —The New Yorker

“One of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world.” —The New York Times Book Review