Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present
Mention his name and most people will say, 'Who?' while the rest think for a bit and ask if he wasn't the one who got involved in all that sleaze back whenever it was ...? It's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing: between Ivor Tesham, a thirty-three year old rising star of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. What excitement Hebe lacks at home, however, is amply compensated for by the well-bred and intensely attractive Tesham - an ardent womanizer and ambitious politican. On the eve of her twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham decides to give Hebe a present to remember: something far more memorable than, say, the costly string of pearls he's already lavished upon her. Involving a fashionable new practice known as 'adventure sex', a man arranges for his unsuspecting but otherwise willing girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and delivered to him at a mutually agreed venue...
About Barbara Vine / Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell & Barbara Vine are one and the same - Barbara is Rendell’s middle name and Vine is a great-grandmother maiden name.
Ruth is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received many awards for her work, including the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger (lifetime achievement award), and the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.
She is the author of a series of many novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Wexford, set in Kingsmarkham, a fictional English town. The first of these, From Doon with Death, is also her first novel and was published in 1964. Books in the series include Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (1992), Simisola (1994), Road Rage (1997), End in Tears (2005), and Not in the Flesh (2007). She also writes novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. These books include A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), A Fatal Inversion (1987), winner of the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction, Gallowglass (1990), King Solomon's Carpet (1991), Asta's Book (1993) and The Brimstone Wedding (1995). The Blood Doctor (2002) is a psychological novel based on the diaries of Lord Henry of Nanther, Queen Victoria's physician. Her two books of collected short stories were published in 1987 and 2008.
Many of her novels and short stories have been successfully adapted for television.
Ruth Rendell was awarded a CBE in 1996. A Life Peerage was conferred on her in 1997 as Baroness Rendell of Babergh.
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