Tragedy has hit the Ashby family too often. The young parents of 13-year-old twin boys died in a plane crash; the elder twin, Patrick, later vanished, leaving a suicide note at the top of the cliffs near their home. Patrick’s brother Simon has become heir to the family property, Latchetts, and Aunt Bee is holding the family together, carefully building the stud farm and stables into a business that will support them until Simon comes of age and gains his inheritance. Just weeks before Simon’s 21st birthday, a young man appears claiming to be Patrick.

The man certainly looks like an Ashby; he also has the family gift with horses and a gentle reserve that reminds Bee of the little boy she has grieved for all these years. But ‘Patrick’ is an impostor. Brat Farrar has felt out of place all his life until he hears of the Ashby family and risks everything in this mad deception. He falls in love with the house, with Aunt Bee and the whole Ashby way of life … but beneath the serenity of Latchetts, there are dark secrets that only Brat’s arrival can bring to light.

Unusual, subtle and filled with unforgettable characterisations, Josephine Tey’s books experiment brilliantly with the traditional mystery genre. In Brat Farrar, the reader knows from the start that Brat is not who he claims to be, which, as Ruth Rendell points out in a newly commissioned introduction, paradoxically gives the novel ‘a greater tension than if its author had led us up the garden path to be weakly surprised at the end’. The pleasure is in the unravelling of other mysteries: the process of detection that brings old crimes and scandals to light alongside the brooding menace of the present – what Rendell calls ‘a point of almost unbearable stress’.