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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 11, No. 4 |
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The new Inspector Wexford mystery probes the past
of TheColumnists.com
Ruth Rendell continues to demonstrate why she's just possibly the best living mystery writer not only in England, but in all the world with her latest in the long series of Inspector Wexford mysteries, "The Monster in the Box" (Scribner, $26).
In the new novel we learn more about Wexford than we've learned in a long, long time as he begins to finally close in on the serial murder suspect he's been chasing since he was first a detective several decades ago.
His name is Eric Targo, a man Wexford simply knows was the killer in a series of unsolved murders, but was never able to nail down with enough evidence to even put the man under arrest. Worse yet, Targo knows Wexford knows and has been taunting him as if they were in some kind of game Targo never loses.
Over the years, Rendell has told us precious little about the youth of Wexford, but this new book has him constantly revisiting his own past--either in bursts of memory or in actual physical efforts to track down people from his earliest days as a policeman in Kingsmarkham. Now we learn about his loves. not all of them ;happy memories for Wexford, and the mistakes he made trying to catch the most elusive of all the suspects he's ever gone after.
Wexford first saw Eric Targo walking his dog past a house where a woman had just been strangled. A short, heavily muscled man, Targo had a sinister bearing and he gave Wexford a penetrating stare that made the young detective feel he was being challenged. But without any real evidence linking Targo to the killing, Wexford couldn't just cite his instinctual dislike of the man and hope that would inspire the lead detective on the case to drop his suspicions of the dead woman's husband and look at Targo as a suspect instead.
At one point in the past, Targo even stalked Wexford, as if he were rubbing it in that the detective was helpless in bringing him to justice.
In the present day, Wexford is drawn into the case of a lovely young student of Pakistani ancestry whose family may be trying to force her into an arranged marriage. When the girl disappears, Wexford discovers Targo has resurfaced in the community after a long absence. Can he be somehow behind her disappearance?
As usual, Rendell's story is tautly told and is rich with character detail as well as an intriguing subcontext of current social issues, especially the attitudes by the English about the Islamic traditions of the many newcomers from the Far East.
This is a fresh and suspenseful mystery, proving once again that Rendell is still at the top of her form a generation after she first attracted the world's attention with her inventive and engaging mysteries.
©2010 by Ron Miller. The book cover reproduction is courtesy of Scribner. This column first posted Jan. 11, 2010.
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