When this new Chief Inspector Wexford novel opens, we find good old stolid Reg tramping along in Framhurst Great Wood on the outskirts of Kingsmarkham, possibly for the last time. For the diggers are moving in to create a new bypass, boon to harassed motorists and anathema to lovers of the "otters in the Brede and the rare map butterfly in Framhurst Deeps".
Biting at the ankles of the despoilers comes a varied array of those who wish to preserve things as they are: well-meaning people of the area under the umbrella of KABAL - Kingsmarkham Against the Bypass and Landfill; Friends of the Earth; the Sussex Wildlife Trust; Greenpeace; a body calling itself SPECIES; and so on. And of course the more way-out groupings, like the New Age People, the Tree People, those who dig caverns in the ground, and those who kidnap folk and threaten to kill them if the road work is not stopped.
This last lot call themselves "Sacred Globe", and among the hostages they are holding to ransom is none other than Reg's wife, Dora. She went off one morning to catch the train for London to be with their younger daughter, Sheila, who had just had a baby - out of wedlock, to conservative Reg's chagrin - and never made either the train, or London.
To make matters worse, the body of a young girl has also been found in the woods, badly decomposed but eventually identified as that of a German tourist called Ulrike Ranke, who disappeared from the area some two months before. Reg's second-in-command, Inspector Mike Burden, quickly comes to the conclusion that a local taxi driver named Stanley Trotter - possibly a country relation of Delboy's? - is responsible for the girl's death, arrests him, but has to let him go for lack of solid evidence.
In the meantime, Reg is quietly tearing his hair out trying to find his wife, but the suspense quickly ebbs away when Dora suddenly turns up in the hallway of their house, not much the worse for wear but unable to give any idea of where she's been kept or of who was keeping her there. But under hypnosis she does come up with information about "the blue thing" which she saw appearing and disappearing from the window of her holding cell - in connection with this I would advise anyone who wishes to keep hostages in their house not to grow the cultivated climber, Ipomoea rubrocaerulea (to non-gardeners, the Morning Glory), against their outside walls.
Soon after Dora's release, the body of a second girl is discovered, this time one of her fellow captives. Is there a connection between this apparent homicide and the murder of the German tourist? Actually, there isn't. And there are quite a few more red herrings strewn about to fool the reader - and to pad out a plot which is rather threadbare by this author's standards.
To be honest, it is difficult to know what kind of criteria to use in reviewing a book by such a revered author. It strikes me that Ms Rendell, like her contemporary P.D. James, could write the word "murder" eighty thousand times, have the resulting document done up as a book and it would sell in millions to her legion of fans.
As Barbara Vine, she writes highly satisfying psychological thrillers, but I feel that the Wexford series may just about have run its course. The present effort reminds me of the offering of an amateur drama society where the members are merely going through their paces: enjoyable on one level, because the characters are like old friends that one entertains once a year, but the setpieces and plot-lines exhibit the frayed edges of too much repetition.
Heresy, perhaps, and I'll probably end up nailed to a tree in Framhurst Great Wood. But beware, anyone who has such designs on my welfare, for Chief Inspector Reg Wexford will surely be on your trail if you carry them out.
Vincent Banville is a freelance journalist and critic
