Straub completes the Blue Rose trilogy with this searing novel of psychological terror. Tim Underhill and the brilliant and reclusive Tom Pasmore court ultimate destruction as they dare to look back to a dark past that holds the secret of evil which signs its name Blue Rose.
Arthur Johnson doesn't look like a murderous psychopath; Locked in the cellar of his building is the perfect willing victim, a woman who can be murdered over and over again, a woman who waits for Arthur every night...
“I didn’t reckon to be flustered “, said Carey, “but this flustered me, proper. Partly, no doubt, it was the way the Guiser was got up. Like a clown with the tunic thing pulled up. It’d have been over his head if—well, never mind. He didn’t paint his face but he had one of these masks. So he looked, if you can follow me, gentlemen, like a kind of doll that the head had come off of. There was the body, sort of doubled up, and there was the head, two feet away, grinning, which was right nasty...”
"A Ruth Rendell Mystery Two years ago he had been a promising young novelist. Now he survived you could hardly call it living - in a near derelict cottage with only an unhooked telephone and his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla - the bored, rich, unstable girl with everything she needed, and a husband she wanted dead. The affair was over. But the long slide into deception and violence had just begun. . . 'A beautiful double-take plot. And characters seen with compassion. Her best yet!' H. R. F. KEATING THE TIMES"
Rare Book
Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but the agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play, unaware of the danger awaiting them if their messages were intercepted...
