The Minotaur

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For the opera by Harrison Birtwistle, see The Minotaur (opera).

The Minotaur
1st edition hardcover
Author	Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Crime / Mystery novel
Publisher	Viking
Publication date	April 7, 2005
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback) & Audio CD
Pages	320 pp (hardcover)
ISBN	ISBN 0-670-91573-4
Preceded by	The Blood Doctor

The Minotaur is a novel by British writer Ruth Rendell, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. It was first published in 2005.

[edit] Plot summary

Kerstin Kvist didn't quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand home, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. The family turned out to be even odder than the house: the widowed Mrs Cosway lived with her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady. A mysterious fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich - came and went, with ill-disguised contempt for the others. More puzzling still was Mrs Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. There's madness in the family' offered one of the daughters by way of explanation, but Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John. Barbara Vine's new book, her twelfth, is compelling in its depiction of the sex, lies and secrets within an apparently respectable family, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn't quite reached rural England (1943).