The Chimney Sweeper's Boy Vine, Barbara

Gerald Candless was a beloved novelist, a devoted husband, a doting father — or so everyone believed until his sudden death. When his daughters begin piecing together his biography, they uncover a man who was none of those things. The deeper they dig, the more their father becomes a stranger: false names, abandoned families, a past meticulously erased. Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell's darker alter ego) constructs a masterclass in psychological suspense, where every revelation peels back another layer of deception. This isn't a whodunit — it's a who-was-he, and the answer is far more unsettling than murder. The prose is cool and precise, the unraveling methodical and merciless. If you're drawn to unreliable narrators, family secrets that corrode from within, or the question of whether we ever truly know the people we love, this will consume you.