The Minotaur by Barbara Vine

The Minotaur is a murder mystery of sorts, but more than that it is a character study of a dysfunctional family and the people with whom they interact. The story is told by Kirsten Kvist, a young, Swedish nurse, hired to serve as a nurse to John Cosway, the mentally ill son of the family. Besides John, the family includes his elderly mother and four sisters. The people who interact with the family include an old family doctor (who is also revealed to be the elderly mother's lover), the local vicar ( who is engaged to one of the sisters), and a painter who has taken a local cottage as his home and studio, and who is engaged in love affairs with at least 2 village women. The house the Cosway's live in is also a kind of character in the novel, as is the maze, from which the title is drawn.

Kirsten (pronounced Shashten) tells the story as a memoir, aided by the diary she kept during the year she spent with the Cosways. Throughout her story, Kirsten throws out hints as to what has happened in the intervening years--often mentioning that everything in the book happened 35 years earlier, and that things would be much different if they were happening today.

Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell; she uses it to write psychological novels, some of which are very dark. In recent years, the books written under the name Barbara Vine have become much more similar to the ones written under the name Ruth Rendell than was originally the case. Still, it is a kind of "heads up" for the reader, to see the name Barbara Vine on the cover, rather than Ruth Rendell.

This particular Barbara Vine novel is among the more intriguing of the ones I've read. The voice of the narrator, Kirsten, is particularly interesting--the more so because of the use of the diary as a prompt for her memory. Not only does the reader see the Cosway family through Kirsten's eyes, we see Kirsten herself change during the time spent with them. Kirsten is also interesting as a narrator, because she reports as a foreigner, who sees the English countryside from a kind of anthropologic viewpoint.

Well worth reading.