From the writer Patricia Cornwell calls the most brilliant mystery novelist of our times comes a typically astute and suspenseful tale of what happens when a taste for dangerous heights becomes a way of life.

Jenny's marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at an old people's 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.

Eccentric Jarvis lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives. Damaged, dispossesed, outcasts, they are brought together in violent and un-foreseen ways by London's dark and dangerous underground system.

The Child's Child is the new crime novel by bestselling, prize-winning author Barbara Vine What sort of betrayal would drive a brother and sister apart?When Grace and her brother Andrew inherit their grandmother's house in Hampstead, they decide to move in together. It seems the obvious thing to do: they've always got on well, the house is large enough to split down the middle, and neither of them likes partying or loud music. There's one thing they've forgotten though: what if one of them wants to bring a lover into the house? When Andrew's partner James moves in, it alters the balance — with almost fatal consequences.Barbara Vine's is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, and The Child's Child is the first book she has published under that name since The Birthday Present in 2008. It's an intriguing examination of betrayal in families, and of those two once-unmentionable subjects, illegitimacy and homosexuality. A taut, thrilling read, it will be enjoyed by readers of P.D. James and Ian Rankin.'Cracking stuff. The Vine continues to flourish... (A) miracle of storytelling with her customary aplomb and cool composure' Express on The Child's Child'The Rendell/Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian RankinRuth rendall has published fourteen novels under the Vine name, two of which, Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet, won the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Also available in Penguin by Barbara Vine: The Minotaur, The Blood Doctor, Grasshopper, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, The Brimstone Wedding, No Night is Too Long, Asta's Book, King Solomon's Carpet, Gallowglass, The House of Stairs, A Dark-Adapted Eye.