King Solomon's Carpet — Barbara Vine

From an Edgar Award–winning author: Murder intrudes on a student’s secret history of the London Underground in this “brilliantly unexpected” mystery (The Times, London).   Jarvis Stringer is a young man of many peculiarities, but no obsession has taken hold quite like that of writing the strange and twisting history of the London Underground. To finance his project, he rents out cheap rooms in the long-disused West Hampstead schoolhouse he inherited—a crumbling monument to morbid local lore.   The boarders, each eking out their invisible lives above—and beneath—the city’s surface, are a collection of strays, waifs, subway buskers, and loners, who are raising the concern of Jarvis’s relatives and more proper neighbors. But even Jarvis has become suspicious. One of his outcasts may be a killer who’s plotting something unforgettable and catastrophic—and Jarvis himself has unwittingly become a conspirator.   “A jolting novel of psychological suspense,” King Solomon’s Carpet was the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award (The New York Times Book Review).