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The Minotaur

The Minotaur

The twelfth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in

Lydstep Old Hall is covered in ivy, full of creaking noises and locked rooms, and reminiscent of Gothic terrors in the fictional houses built by the Brontës. Since the Barbara Vine persona inevitably indicates an extra degree of creepiness, the library has alarming twists and turns. Only the most hardened of readers could bear not to read on.

—Jane Jakeman 1

Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John’s strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway.

Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own.

Notes

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. Book review by Jane Jakeman, Independent 2005. ↩︎

  2. Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎