King Solomon's Carpet

King Solomon's Carpet

Barbara Vine

#1240 of 8,085 books · #359 in Crime & Thriller

Won the Gold Dagger Award (CWA Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year) (1991).

King Solomon's Carpet won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award. Jarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compiling his obsessive, secret history of London's Underground. His presence and his strange house draw a band of misfits into his orbit: young Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who gets his kicks on the tube; and mysterious Axel, whose dark secret later casts a shadow over all of their lives. Dispossessed and outcast, those who come to inhabit Jarvis's schoolhouse are gradually brought closer together in violent and unforeseen ways by London's forbidding and dangerous Underground.