According to the London Sunday Express, Ruth Rendell is "one of the best novelists writing today." For readers new to her work, this collection of five mysteries, all cases for Detective Chief Inspector Wexford, is a perfect introduction. In Wexford, Rendell has created a rare and endearing character. Like all memorable and remarkable individuals, Wexford is a man of great intuitive power. His best performances are flashes of insight, solutions that seem more inspired by instinct than intellect.
The impossible has happened. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coachhouse in Hampstead belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila. For all the benefits of a more relaxed way of life, Wexford misses being the law. But a chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case.
A Wexford mystery. Only 18 black people live in Kingsmarkham. One is Wexford's new doctor, whose daughter disappears. Chief Inspector Wexford takes more than a mere professional interest in the case, testing not only his powers of deduction, but his beliefs and prejudices about racial equality.
After weeks of rain, Chief Inspector Wexford has just finished moving his books and furniture upstairs to protect them from the rising waters when the telephone rings. Two local teenagers and their babysitter have gone missing. Wexford isn't particularly worried, since these things usually sort themselves out. But as hours stretch into days, he begins to suspect he has a kidnapping on his hands. The stakes get even higher when a member of the missing trio turns up dead in the woods nearby.
Nobody has a better ear for the whine of the unloved and underappreciated than Ruth Rendell. Early in this Inspector Wexford adventure, a young woman who was bound and gagged during a robbery demands victim counseling; not long after, families of some people taken hostage quickly cluster themselves into a support group. The titular "road rage" is equally timely and politically correct: protestors have gathered from around the world to stop, by whatever means they can, a new motorway that will cut through some of the woods surrounding Wexford's fictional but endearing village of Kingsmarkham.
