The Chimney Sweeper&39s Boy [Paperback]

Writing as Barbara Vine, Britain's preeminent mystery novelist Ruth Rendell crafts literary suspense of the highest order. With this richly textured and utterly absorbing page-tumer, Vine adds to her growing reputation as one of the great writers of our time.
Bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Gerald Candless dies suddenly, and leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, his daughter Sarah puts aside her university studies and agrees to write a biography of her famous father. But as she begins her research and pulls back the veil of his past, her life is slowly torn apart: a terrible logic begins to unfold that explains her mother's remoteness, her father's need to continually reinvent himself -- and sheds shocking light on a long-forgotten London murder.Chapter One
It is an error to say the eyes have expression. Eyebrows and eyelids, lips, the planes of the face, all these are indicators of emotion. The eyes are merely colored liquid in a glass.
-- A MESSENGER OF THE GODS

Not a word to my girls, he had said on the way home from the hospital.Mygirls, as if they weren't also hers. She was used to it, he always said that, and in a way they were more his. I'm not hearing this, she said.
You're going to have major surgery and your grown-up children aren't to be told.
'Major surgery,' he said. You sound like Staff Nurse Samantha in a hospital sitcom. I won't have Sarah and Hope worried. I won't give them a day of hell while they await the result.
You flatter yourself, she thought, but that was just spite. He didn't. They would have a day of hell; they would have anguish, while she had a little mild trepidation.
He made her promise. It wasn't difficult. She wouldn't have cared for the task of telling them.

The girls came down as usual. In the summer they came down every weekend, and in the winter, too, unless the roads were impassable. They had forgotten the Romneys l£7