To Florence Hackett and her daughters Elinor and Louisa, Richard Baurie, a handsome young bookstore clerk and aspiring poet, seems a little odd but harmless enough. With his amusing conversation and his eager-to-please attitude, Richard works his way into the Hacketts' confidence until he is almost one of the family. When he suggests they rent Wisteria Cottage, a charming seaside residence, it seems to promise a summer of pleasant companionship and fun. What the Hacketts don't know is that Richard is a deeply troubled individual, recently released from a mental institution, and that their relaxing summer holiday will soon turn into a terrifying nightmare.... A brilliant psychological examination of criminal insanity, Robert M. Coates's Wisteria Cottage (1948) earned rave reviews on its initial publication and was adapted for the 1958 film noir Edge of Fury . As Mathilde Roza writes in the introduction to this new edition, "the novel has lost nothing of its remarkable power of taking the reader into a disturbed man's world." "A brilliant tour de force."— The New York Times Book Review "Top peaks of terror . . . a grade-A psycho-thriller!"— Saturday Review "As direct and frightening as the uncoiling of a serpent."— Commonweal