A DOG'S RANSOM

It is too bad that with Miss Highsmith's appearance on a new list she seems to be taking a vacation from her usual excellence and that her two-part story serves to some extent as an outlet for her criticism of the police force — their sheer slipshoddiness or outright brutality. The first half deals with the snatch of a now childless couple's "snob" poodle by a young man who extorts two ransoms before he is picked up by the police, permitted to escape, and when again taken, paroled and murdered. The second part entails the officer on the case, an equally uncertain character. Both, to be frank, are subnormal creeps rather than the psychopaths she has invested with such brilliance in the past.