The author of Anna's Book -- who was hailed as "one of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world" by the New York Times Book Review -- has written a relentlessly compelling tale of sexual obsession, mistaken identity, and murder.

Tim thought he'd gotten away with it. For months after the murder off the Alaskan coast he'd heard not a word. No policeman at his door asking questions. Nothing. And then the letters began. At first they seemed almost innocuous accounts of historical events. But a common theme emerged quickly. It was particularly germane to Tim, and it related directly to murder.

In No Night Is Too Long, Barbara Vine has written a tour de force, rich in characters and setting, a remarkable novel by an internationally celebrated master of her craft. To research the book, the author and her husband embarked on a boat trip from Seattle up the Alaskan coast. The stark beauty of that experience provides No Night Is Too Long with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. The novel's exploration of sexual identity and guilt represents a departure for Vine. Its resolution -- as always -- is a stunning surprise.

Barbara Vine's profile page

Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine's first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won an Edgar Award, the highest honor of the Mystery Writers of America. A Fatal Inversion won the English equivalent, the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award. Her most recent novel, Anna's Book, was published in 1993. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who holds honorary doctorates from the University of Essex and the University of Bowling, Green, Ohio, she has one grown son and lives with her husband and two cats in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk, England.

Praise for Barbara Vine's most recent novel, Anna's Book

"Absorbing, complexly crafted ... a brilliantly executed tour de force."

-- Wall Street Journal

"Anna's Book is a captivating story within a captivating story, a first-rate study of class, gender, and character, a courtroom drama and an un-put-downable page-turner."

-- Susan Isaacs, Washington Post Book World

"Louche and adventurous ... a mystery carefully laid out and ingeniously solved."

-- Village Voice Literary Supplement

Praise for Barbara Vine

"When Ruth Rendell, already the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world, launched a second byline, Barbara Vine, she actually stepped up her writing level."

-- Time

"This gifted author's ability to draw us so completely into her vividly realized, guilt-ridden worlds that they seem to meld, seamlessly, with our own is what makes her one of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world."

-- Joyce Carol-Oates, New York Times Book Review

"Simply put, [she] is one of the greatest writers ever."

-- Scott Turow