The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine

Writing as Barbara Vine, Britain's preeminent mystery novelist Ruth Rendell crafts literary suspense of the highest order. With this richly textured and utterly absorbing page-tumer, Vine adds to her growing reputation as one of the great writers of our time.
Bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Gerald Candless dies suddenly, and leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, his daughter Sarah puts aside her university studies and agrees to write a biography of her famous father. But as she begins her research and pulls back the veil of his past, her life is slowly torn a terrible logic begins to unfold that explains her mother's remoteness, her father's need to continually reinvent himself -- and sheds shocking light on a long-forgotten London murder.