Review by New York Times Review
Still writing against the grain, Ruth Rendell opens her 21st Inspector Wexford mystery, NOT IN THE FLESH (Crown, $25.95), with a rustic English scene featuring a truffle hound named Honey who leads her master to a fragrant growth of fungi buried in Old Grimble's Field. Since this author has neither taste nor time for sentimentality, the mood is abruptly shattered when Honey digs up a skeleton and the picturesque countryman whips out his cellphone to call the police. In the best whodunit tradition, Rendell advances her plot through surprises, some transparent enough to satisfy the engaged reader, others so shocking they dash all calculations. Once a second, fresher body is unearthed on the Grimble property, the original killing no longer seems so obviously tied to a decade-old land dispute. It makes us wonder about all the other people who've gone missing in the vicinity of Kingsmarkham and speculate on why some lives seem to have more value than others. Wexford himself reflects on the fact that women and children are tracked more rigorously than men, who are supposedly more inclined by nature to walk away from their problems. Rendell relies on the same biased thinking to misdirect the police investigation into the lives of the residents whose old houses border Grimble's Field. Calling attention to one local scandal - like the domestic ménage of a famous author and his two wives - is sure to distract from other long-buried village secrets. Even Wexford is preconditioned by his own compassion (for "people - women, mostly - who have been sheltered and protected all their lives and suddenly find themselves alone") to miss signs of criminality. Characters who are old and infirm are especially hard to fathom in a narrative that respects their humanity while refusing to white-wash their flaws. The disagreeable John Grimble might be a cantankerous cuss - or a vicious killer. His disabled neighbor, Irene McNeil, might be a lonely widow - or a nasty old hag. No less than the battered women and the maligned immigrants who play peripheral roles, the village elders can be pathetic, but they can also be evil. Because Rendell views people without prejudice and is surprised by nothing they do, the only character who conforms to type is Honey the truffle dog. Anxious about identity theft? Well, as a Jeffery Deaver character says, "If somebody wants to destroy your life, there's nothing you can do about it." That's the theme of THE BROKEN WINDOW (Simon & Schuster, $26.95), one of the most unnerving of Deaver's eight novels featuring his quadriplegic forensic detective, Lincoln Rhyme. Smarter and scarier than the genre's garden-variety nut jobs, the mad genius at work in this book takes pride in penetrating secure databases. After stripping people of an essential piece, of their lives, he frames them for his own murderous deeds. But here, the rape-torture-killing element seems largely just a concession to the sensationalistic formula of the thriller. Deaver is far more caught up in the devious mechanics of identity fraud, analyzed in depth by Rhyme once it's determined that the killer has access to the supersecret files of a datamining company whose clients include government agencies. While murder is still murder, the image that lingers in this Orwellian nightmare is that of the villain's original guinea pig, once a doctor, now a wretch who calls himself Job and lives in flophouses, hiding from the angry God who stole his life. The wickedly endearing hit man John Keller normally conducts his business in the brisk format of the short story. But Lawrence Block's amiable antihero, who's in Des Moines on a simple point-and-shoot assignment, needs all the extra attention he gets in HIT AND RUN (Morrow, $24.95) after someone sets him up to take the fall for a high-profile political assassination. Having spent most of his ready cash on rare stamps (a hobby offering "a more orderly sphere where serenity ruled and logic prevailed"), Keller barely manages to keep his cool as he makes an extremely tense and hazardous cross-country getaway. By the time he pulls up in New Orleans (an apt destination for someone who fears he's "never going to feel secure again"), the badly rattled button man is ready to retire from the game. Will he or won't he? Block teases out the question thoughtfully, in displays of wry wit and philosophical double-think, and leaves Keller just where we want him: hanging from an existential cliff. In Chapter 1 of THE WATER'S EDGE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), Daniel Judson's carefully built but overwritten novel of guilt and redemption in Southampton, a man looks out a window in the rain and witnesses a double murder. Figuring 13 words to the line, that takes more than 1,500 words. In Chapter 2, a different man awakens in the dark and answers his cellphone. That's another 2,500 words. At this rate, anyone can see where things are headed - to more moody weather reports and bleak interior monologues than any thriller can sustain. The sluggish pace isn't entirely due to Judson's prose style, having as much to do with his construction of two parallel plotlines to deliver the same story from different perspectives. Either protagonist No. 1, Jake Bechet, former boxer and retired mob muscle, or protagonist No. 2, Tommy Miller, former P.I. and son of a crooked cop, could carry this violent gangster narrative on his own. But when the action takes place during a soggy spring in a coastal resort on Long Island, that's double the work and double the talk - and a lot of weather reporting. In Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford mystery, a dog finds a skeleton in the English countryside.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Rendell, winner of three Edgar Awards, has two primary approaches in her acclaimed crime fiction: edgy novels of psychological suspense and more traditional police procedurals starring Chief Inspector Wexford of Kingsmarkham, Sussex. Where Rendell's suspense can leave the reader deliciously unsettled, the Wexford novels place the reader on solid, sometimes overly familiar, ground. For example, Rendell overrelies on the old see who cracks when the police visit convention, using the questioning of witnesses/suspects in their homes as a launch pad for scathing comments on home decor and the occupants' physical attributes after the fourth or fifth visit, the formula starts to creak. But Rendell works feverishly within the form to deliver some surprises, starting here with the discovery of a human hand by a dog trained to hunt for truffles in the woods. The remains, according to the pathologist, have been buried for almost a decade. Wexford centers his investigation on the owners of the land where the hand was found, a contentious couple, greatly caught up in land disputes. When a second body is found in a basement wood pile, the action takes off. Rendell keeps the suspense going nicely, even if Wexford remains something of a cardboard character, and the procedure is mostly rooted in the past. For devoted fans of the series, of whom there are many, this will be much anticipated and, as always, satisfying; for others, only so-so.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Rendell's superb 21st Inspector Wexford mystery (after 2005's End in Tears), the British police detective investigates first one, then two male bodies that turn up on the old Grimble property in the insular hamlet of Flagford. Who were these men? Are their deaths related? Older people fill this wise and nuanced story--sleepy, bitter and disengaged--since no "current" crime is at stake, just these two literal skeletons from the past. Among the suspects in the bizarre case are dying fantasy novelist Owen Tredown, who lives with two loopy women, Claudia and Maeve, his divorced first and second wives, in a hideous Victorian manor. Outside groups--including members of the Somali community and itinerant fruit-pickers--tantalize with their secrets and idiosyncrasies. The suspense persists until the book's final sentences, when the last pieces of the puzzle click elegantly yet unexpectedly into place. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The prolific Rendell (or Barbara Vine, depending on what you're reading) offers her 21st Chief Inspector Wexford novel. Readers watch as a truffle-hunting suburbanite and his dog stumble across a long-buried body on a vacant property. Upon investigation, Wexford and his team uncover a second murder victim in the basement of the abandoned house on the property. The crimes were committed so long ago that the bodies themselves yield few clues, but the neighbors all seem to have reasons to be cast in a suspicious light. Wexford embarks on an arduous probe in an effort to unravel the mystery, encountering along the way the usual odd assortment of characters. Interspersed in his investigation is an odd subplot involving the genital mutilation of young Somali immigrants in Britain. As always, Wexford endures modern (and in his opinion, less civilized) British society and patiently prods his suspects until they reveal all. Not quite as compelling in tone as some of Rendell's other works but complex enough to satisfy any mystery fan. Recommended for all public libraries.--Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and his Kingsmarkham colleagues (End in Tears, 2005, etc.) deal with not one but two bodies of men whose relatives long ago gave up hope of ever hearing from them again. Jim Belbury's truffle dog makes the first discovery: a man interred 11 years ago in a drainage ditch. John Grimble and his friend Bill Runge had dug the ditch back when Grimble expected permission to replace the tumbledown house on Old Grimble's Field with four new homes. They filled in the ditch when permission was denied. DI Mike Burden, searching the boarded-up house, finds a second corpse, this one waiting eight years in its underclothes to be found. Ancient former neighbor Irene McNeil tells Wexford that her late husband Ron shot the intruder in self-defense when he brandished a knife, and for a time it seems that the killers may be easier to identify than the victims. New inquiries into open missing-persons cases and repeated conversations with other neighbors--especially dying fantasy novelist Owen Tredown and the two wives, present and past, who live with him--only deepen the mystery. Back in the present, Wexford's daughter Sheila, cast in the starring role in a film adaptation of Tredown's most famous book, tries to enlist her father in the battle against the circumcision of young Somali girls in the neighborhood--a episode that at least hints at a happy ending. Rich, tangled and as sharply observed as ever. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
