Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
• Shelf wear or scuffing on the cover
• Creases, marks, or tears on pages or dust jacket
• Possible remainder marks or previous owner’s name/notes inside
Cover art:
Blurb: “Benet Archdale had long been plagued by the alarming (and occasionally dangerous) eccentricities of her mother, Mopsa. Once when she was about fourteen, they had been alone in a train compartment, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It had been a while since Benet had seen her mother, and when Mopsa arrived at Heathrow looking old and harmless, Benet hoped —for the sake of her peaceful life with her baby son, James —that the dangerous days were over.
Carol Stratford is also a young single mother, but for her, the sameness of each day with a baby son offers not peace but an increasingly heavy burden that even a kindly new lover cannot lift. When a death in the family propels Mopsa into action again, she brings the worlds of these two women into a dreadful collision, setting into motion a spiraling sequence that includes kidnapping, fraud, family violence, and death. A nightmarish tangle of accusations and hostilities casts shadows on the simplest, sanest deeds, as Benet's ability to sift reason from madness slowly erodes. Haunted by an enigmatic image in a children's mural —the tree of hands- she desperately begins to play her mother's own game.
The prize: her last chance for a normal life.
In a thriller wrought with emotion and drama, Ruth Rendell explores the dark side of the deep and often destructive bond between parent and child, where guilt and greed can masquerade as love. In doing so, she has created her most intimate, intense, and compulsively readable book yet.”