A brilliant, gripping and inventive novel about sex and identity from the master crime writer, Ruth Rendell, here writing as Barbara Vine. When successful author Gerald Candless dies of a sudden heart attack, his eldest daughter Sarah is approached by her father's publisher with a view to writing a biography about his life. Sarah embarks on the memoir but soon discovers that her perfect father was not all he appeared to be, and that in fact he wasn't Gerald Candless at all.

Candless's neglected wife Ursula gradually regains her self-confidence and begins a new relationship as she realises that the unhappiness of her marriage was due, not to her own shortcomings, but to her husband's latent homosexuality - indeed the reason itself as to why her husband became 'Gerald Candless' in the first place.