"Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine"--Cover.

When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings decide to move in together. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for them, until the day Andrew brings home a boyfriend. James is a devilishly handsome novelist, but his strident comments about Grace's doctoral thesis puncture the house's idyllic atmosphere. When he and Andrew witness their friend's murder outside a London nightclub, James begins to unravel, and what happens next will change their lives. Just as turmoil sets in at Dinmont House, Grace escapes into reading a manuscript, a novel from 1951 called The Child's Child, never published, due to its frank sexual depictions. The book is the story of two siblings, John and Maud, born a few years after World War I, a story that eerily mirrors the present-day Andrew and Grace.