A Dark-Adapted Eye

A Dark-Adapted Eye - a prize-winning crime classic by bestselling author Barbara Vine

Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award

'A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel' P.D. James

'Compulsively readable ... a carefully devised plot unfolded with the most cunning art. Wilkie Collins and Dickens would have admired it' Sunday Times

Like most families they had their secrets . . .

And they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.

'Brilliantly plotted. Vine is not afraid to walk down the mean streets of the mind and can build up an almost tangible atmosphere of menace and unease' Daily Telegraph

'Will linger in your memory long after you have closed the book. A first-rate novel' Washington Post

A Dark-Adapted Eye is modern classic. If you enjoy the crime novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love this book.

Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye ; The House of Stairs ; Gallowglass ; Asta's Book ; No Night Is Too Long ; In the Time of His Prosperity ; The Brimstone Wedding ; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy ; Grasshopper ; The Blood Doctor ; The Minotaur ; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child .