King Solomon's Carpet (Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine) Reta...

In the Gold Dagger Award–winning crime novel, a young man writing a history of London’s Underground must contend with a killer living under his own roof

All his young life, Jarvis Stringer has obsessed over the London Underground. Now he’s writing a detailed history of the subway, and to make money in the meantime he rents out cheap rooms in the crumbling former schoolhouse he’s inherited, all to desperate single mothers, buskers, subway vigilantes, and assorted misfits. But when one of his boarders turns out to be a murderer, Jarvis becomes distracted from his work—to say the very least.

King Solomon’s Carpet

is an absorbing depiction of London’s subterranean landscape and of those eking out invisible lives beneath society’s surfaces.