THE MINOTAUR

Ruth Rendell, in her Barbara Vine guise, is in top form here with a thoroughly modern gothic novel. Her narrator, not Jane Eyre, but young Swede Kerstin Kvist, takes a job caring for an Englishman whose family members claim he's schizophrenic and drug him to the gills. The patient, his mother, and three of his sisters live in a forbidding hall called Lydstep, with a locked library and multiple guilty secrets. The sexless local rector is engaged to one sister, the village lothario is sleeping with two of them. Rosalyn Landor's lovely oboe voice subtly distinguishes among the ladies of this creepy family as well as artfully modulates the tension as it builds around the appalled young narrator. B.G. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 06]