ROAD RAGE

Rendell's evolution from the unnervingly focused analyst of plausible psychoses to the more outward chronicler who uses crime to diagnose the ills of contemporary Britain—one of the glories of today's mystery fiction—continues in a masterful tale of eco-terrorism that chills Chief Inspector Wexford as none of his earlier cases have. In order to protest the building of an unsightly and disruptive new bypass around Kingsmarkham, a band of eco-terrorists calling themselves the Sacred Globe take five hostages and threaten to kill them one by one unless Her Majesty's Government agrees to abandon plans for the bypass. The hostages, kidnapped in an unusually inventive way, include an inoffensive older couple, an aspiring model, a teenaged boy, and Wexford's wife Dora, snatched on her way to visit her newest grandchild. Rendell places her hero's nerve-racking attempts to track Sacred Globe to their lair within a vast canvas that makes room for each of the victims' agonized relatives, half a dozen environmental organizations of subtly different stripes, a marvelously shaded group portrait of Wexford's troops—and a subplot involving a slain German hitchhiker, the discovery of whose body comes as an especially nasty surprise to readers so thorougly caught up in the other characters' issues and lives. Rendell's most probing and ambitious book since—well, since Wexford's Edgar-winning last appearance in Simisola (1995).