Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Halls animal cemetery. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there or how they are to live they scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. She may look like a beautiful child, but she has given birth. In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping in Wyvis Hall. Zosie, with feathery markings on her abdomen and thighs. Who will break first?īut it’s Adam who falls for Zosie. Adam, Rufus and Shiva, 10 years later, remembering, fearing. Adam read from the dictionary: “ ‘A piece of property which is found ownerless, and which if unclaimed. There were four of them that summer Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien.

an instant of time.” And everything changed.

Two men, “the eyes of each of them held the other’s for. Then a casual encounter at Heathrow Airport. The book begins 10 years later, with the finding of bones: a woman and a baby. Wyvis Hall is big, beautiful and deep in the Sussex countryside. You soon learn that there are three men who have. Adam Verne-Smith, aged 19, inherits his great-uncle’s house. It starts with the discovery of a skeleton in a graveyard for pets. The perfect pacing, the step by step revelations. Read Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell’s alter ego. The series starred Jeremy Northam and Douglas Hodge.How to write suspense, to bring the reader from unknowing to knowing. The BBC adapted the novel for Radio 4 in 1991, and in three episodes for television in 1992 as the first novel to be adapted for The Barbara Vine Mysteries. 1 The novel won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger in that year and, in 1987, was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, a special award to select the best Gold Dagger winner of the awards 50-year history. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there or how. A Fatal Inversion is a 1987 novel by Ruth Rendell, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. But which woman is dead? And whose child? In the long, hot summer of 1976, a group of young people is camping in Wyvis Hall. Slowly the facts emerge and the past catches up with them.

The horrific discovery challenges the buried memories and guilt of a small group of young people who, 10 years earlier, spent the broiling Summer of 1976 in a self-indulgently irresponsible idyll at Wyvis Hall, unexpectedly inherited by one of their number. In the process of burying a beloved dog in the animal cemetery of Wyvis Hall, a beautiful Suffolk country house, the owner unearths the skeletons of a dead woman and baby. The novel won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in that year and, in 1987, was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, a special award to select the best Gold Dagger winner of the award's 50-year history. A Fatal Inversion is a 1987 novel by Ruth Rendell, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine