The Brimstone Wedding
The eighth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 1996
I simply started with the idea of an elderly lady in a nursing home and a carer, because I had an aunt who died in a nursing home last year - it wasn’t in the least like the book, of course, but that was my idea. And then the notion of a house that was hidden until the deeds were discovered by the children, because that happened to somebody I knew. Once I had that, the characters came along and then I was there.
Jenny’s marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at a care home, where she is especially fond of Stella, a woman dying of cancer—whose own secrets parallel Jenny’s—with the difference that she may have been involved in murdering her lover’s husband.
Notes
- In the Time of His Prosperity: the only Barbara Vine short story, originally published as part of a Penguin 60th anniversary anthology and later featured in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2005.
Contemporary Reads 2
Val McDermid - Booked for Murder
Karin Fossum - Don’t Look Back
Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman
Michael Connelly - The Poet
Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
Alan Furst - The World at Night
Footnotes
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