The Minotaur

A nurse is enlisted to care for the mysterious patriarch of a country estate in this "elegant and gripping" novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The Washington Post).

No sooner does young Swedish nurse Kerstin Kvist arrive for her live-in position at Lydstep Old Hall, an isolated estate deep in the Essex countryside, than she's warned: "There's madness in the family." Specifically, it's that of her patient, John Cosway, the disoriented family patriarch. True, he does appear to haunt the labyrinthine home, rather than inhabit it. But Kerstin's graver concerns are with the five women who seem to be closing in on her charge like the web of Virginia creeper that chokes the manor house itself.

John's mother and four sisters—all nasty pieces of work—snipe, gossip, and whisper about the man they hope to have declared insane and locked up. After all, he's the source of the morbid Cosway history, the monster in their maze. But Lydstep Old Hall has too many shadows for just one secret, and to save John, Kerstin is determined to unearth them. But she'd better be careful, because she's already starting to lose her way in the dark.

In The Minotaur, Edgar Award winner Ruth Rendell "drolly sends up the 19th-century Gothic novel. . . . Even without the allusions to The Woman in White and Jane Eyre, readers will spot the genre trappings of the Victorian sensation novel—from the skeletons in the closet to the bats in the belfry" (The New York Times Book Review).