Grasshopper is an enthralling, chilling novel by the bestselling queen of crime Barbara Vine
'They have sent me here because of what happened on the pylon'
When Clodagh Brown writes these words at the age of nineteen, she believes that she is leaving behind the traumatic events of her youth. But Clodagh soon learns that you can never entirely escape your past.
In the aftermath of the incident on the pylon - a gargantuan electrified grasshopper - Clodagh goes off to university, moves into a basement flat arranged by her unsympathetic family, and finds freedom trekking across London's rooftops with a gang of neighborhood misfits. As she begins a thrilling relationship with a fellow climber, however, both Clodagh and the reader are haunted by the memory of the pylon and of the terrible thing that happened there - and by the eerie sense that another tragedy is just a footfall away.
Grasshopper is a modern crime masterpiece that will have you gripped from the first page to the last. If you enjoy the novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love this book.
'The Rendell/ Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian Rankin
'A superb and original writer' Amanda Craig, Express
Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.
Clodagh is supposed to feel guilty and is being punished more than anyone quite realises; it was the love of high places that led her to climb pylons and got her best friend killed--it is claustrophobia which is driving her to the edge in the basement London flat to which she has been exiled. Barbara Vine's brilliantly atmospheric new thriller Grasshopper is the tale of Clodagh's recovery and liberation; it is also the tale of new mistakes, and their disastrous consequences. In the London of the late 1980s, Clodagh finds her own level--and it is way above the streets, with a roof-jaunting group of disaffected young people, each with a trauma of their own. For Swedish Liv, it is the nightmare of au-pairing; for Silver, it was abduction as a small boy; for the sinister young thug Jimmy, it was sexual abuse on a massive scale. When they graduate from merely clambering around to trying to do good, that is when the trouble starts... We all know where good intentions lead, after all. Vine is more good-natured than usual here--we know that the mature electrician Clodagh who tells the story came through OK, and that her voice is one we can trust, more or less... --Roz Kaveney
