King Solomon's Carpet by Barbara Vine

From the back of the book:

Jarvis Stringer lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking a tube line, compliling 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: trunt Jasper who gets his kicks on the tubel and mysterious Axel, whose dark secret later casts a shadow over all their lives.

Dispossessed and outcast, those who come to inhabit Jarvis's schoolouse are gradually brought closer to violent and unforseen wys by Lodon's forbidding and dangerous Underground.....

Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell is one of my favourite authors, she has written some terrific novels. Sadly, for me, this wasn't one of them. There were too many characters, I found I couldn't get fully focussed on one before the story jumped to another one. I didn't empathise with any of them except perhaps for the elderly, bewildered Cecililia whose daughter Tina lives in the schoolhouse and sleeps around.

I did like the facts and history given about the underground, I like trains (though steam is more my thing) and it was this that probably kept me reading. Also, the schoolhouse is set in Westend Lane, a road I travelled most days of my life in London. The Railway Tavern is even mentioned, a pub I ran as a rock venue in the early 1990s. It's always enjoyable reading books set in areas we know well, another factor that kept me reading. Overall though, this has to be my least favourite Vine book, I'm disappointed to come across something of hers I actually don't like that much.