The Turnglass: The Sunday Times Bestseller - turn the book, uncover the mystery – Rubin Gareth (2024)

The Turnglass is an immersive mystery presented as a tête-bêche novel, a format in which two intertwined stories are printed back-to-back. Both covers are front covers, and the book can be read in either direction or with the chapters alternated. In 1880s England, idealistic young doctor Simeon Lee is called from London to the bleak island of Ray, off the Essex coast, to treat his dying cousin, Parson Oliver Hawes. Hawes believes he is being poisoned and accuses his sister-in-law, Florence, who was declared insane after killing Oliver’s brother in a jealous rage and is now confined in a glass-walled apartment in the library of Turnglass House. The secret of how she came to be there lies in Hawes’s tête-bêche journal, whose two sides tell very different stories. In 1930s California, celebrated author Oliver Tooke, son of the state governor, is found dead in his writing hut near the family residence, Turnglass House. His friend Ken Kourian refuses to believe that Oliver took his own life. His investigation leads to the mysterious kidnapping of Oliver’s brother in childhood and the secret incarceration of his mother, Florence, in an asylum. To uncover the truth, Ken must decipher the clues hidden in Oliver’s final book, a tête-bêche novel about a young doctor called Simeon Lee.