very strange.

I listened to the whole book. very confusing. never got t grips with it

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Such intricate family trees and detailed history.

Very complicated storyline that was difficult to follow. I gave up after Chapter 3, I never do that!

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Beautifully written and read but how intense!

Tremendous performance by Harriet Walter. Barbara Vine writes beautifully. A deep and intense account of a family secret with a tragic ending.

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a wonderful, skilled book.

The writing was superb as was the narration. This book puts very many modern stories to shame. I loved it.

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Intriguing and unusual. Beautifully narrated.

A tale of family secrets and lies brought together by clever plotting and a first-rate narrator.

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Tried hard to listen

Tried hard to keep going with the story but really it's very dreary so boring, sorry not for me! The reader was good though and did her best.

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Who doesn't love a family secret?

A Barbara Vine book I always meant to read but never did which is a shame as the gentle, detailed story telling belies a superb psychological thriller. Unlike more recent examples of the genre, this is no sensational quick fix but a crafted tale set in a by-gone era where societies attitudes were different to those of today.
The title's worth a mention - the 'dark-adapted eye' [one that has adjusted to darkness so that it's able to discern the shape of things] is that of Faith, the two main protagonist's niece, as she looks back upon her family's checkered history, to analyse it, unravel it's darkest secrets, that ultimately lead up to the murder of one aunt & the subsequent hanging of the other as set before the repeal of the death penalty.

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Great storytelling

A thoughtfully written story from Barbara Vine with excellent narration by Harriet Walter. The story is complex and I thought it developed slowly- in fact I almost gave up due to the complicated nature of the timeline and the host of different characters.
However I’m glad I persevered and I became determined to find out who the victim was and why. I can’t say that I liked any of the characters much but that doesn’t detract from the story being a fascinating one.

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Not her best novel

I have listened to a couple of previous novels and really enjoyed. However, i found that I couldn’t really care about the story or the characters, and was left unfulfilled by this book.

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Brilliant story, with dark and complex characters

A brilliant, dark, thought-provoking story with some of the most well-realised and complex characters I’ve ever come across. Whatever ‘crime’ novels or ‘detective fiction’ or ‘thrillers’ are usually supposed to be, for me this utterly transcended those genres. As the narrator comments, we know from the start who the killer is and how the murder was done. Instead of focussing on that, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) unfolds the psychology of the Hillyard family with a perceptiveness that sometimes takes your breath away. It made me think that other books I’ve read with supposedly ‘deep’ or ‘complex’ characters are quite flat and obvious by comparison. There are lots of twists in the plot, but they never felt like contrivances or clever tricks. They come about as Faith, the character who narrates the story, grows gradually wiser and more perceptive about the secretive ways of her two aunts – as her ‘eye’ adapts to understand their dark behaviour, to paraphrase the title. Harriet Walter was an excellent reader, appropriately understated in her delivery but giving distinctive, memorable voices to the characters, many of whom are painfully repressed and reserved. This is the first Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell I’ve read or listened to, and I’ll certainly read more now.

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11 people found this helpful