The Rottweiler is about seduction, love and guilt. More accurately, it is an extended triple fugue upon these subjects. All who stand in admiration of Ruth Rendell’s work and who have listened attentively to the melodies she can weave with these three notes know that the resulting tune is going to be in the minor, unsettling key.

The young women of London, yet again, are being stalked by a serial killer. The first victim had bite marks on her neck, so the murderer (and what else in an era when killers are given nicknames?) is called the Rottweiler. As the book opens, another body has been found not far from Inez Ferry’s antiques shop. And there — either because they live in the apartments above the shop or work in it — assemble various people coming to terms with seduction, love and guilt.

Inez, the widow of an actor she adored, spends her time watching videos of his last performances, mute with longing for lost love. Zeinab, her Asian shop assistant, lives happily with the father of her two children while simultaneously engaged to two men who shower her with jewellery. Jeremy Quick, polite, attractive and extremely eligible, needs to invent a girlfriend with a sick mother in order to keep himself clear of female entanglements. The much-married Ludmilla has a live-in friend, Freddy, who, however feckless, seems to be the only truly happy person in the book. And then there is Will Cobbett, whom nobody dares call “retarded”, and whose love serves only to stifle the life of his aunt Becky.

The identity of the murderer is not long in doubt, and Rendell is free to direct the reader’s attention to her real business, discovering the circumstances that would make an otherwise upstanding, law-abiding man the victim of a murderous impulse that he is no more able to resist than he could an attack of cholera. He is at times horrified by his own behaviour, but is unable to stop. Another character identifies him and does not hesitate to blackmail him, an action that the killer, and probably the reader, views with righteous indignation.

Why are we surprised when wicked characters express conventional attitudes about right and wrong? Have television and film dulled us to such a point that villains must be all bad? Anwar, the blackmailer, a young man with the moral sense of a pit viper, feels nothing but contempt for the fecklessness of his assistants, and the killer despises greed and crime; indeed, he would bring back the death penalty if he could. Conversely, sweet-tempered and friendly Will is not above a bit of nasty jealousy.

The book is animated by a search for the cause of evil. In the case of the serial killer, a specific cause is finally unearthed in a memory of frothing guilt and desire, but Anwar’s viciousness has no such identifiable cause, forcing one to confront a truth often observed in Rendell’s books: some people are evil, and that’s the end of it.

Some characters encounter sex, but love seldom has much to do with it. Becky has a brief affair with James, seemingly the ideal English gentleman but as thorough a swine as one is likely to meet, yet guilt traps her in the end. Will has sex tossed at him but fails to understand what it is. Inez finds it, at last, and settles for it, realising that it is a far cry from love.

As ever, Rendell takes the reader into the minds of the most disparate characters: Decent, conventional Inez provides no surprises, but James, who watches human grief and pain, is struck by the suffering the resulting inconvenience causes him, and Anwar meets whom he suspects “of total honesty”. Rendell has endless compassion for weakness and error, but she cannot abide a snob or a prig, and real malice chills her soul.

At times, the book seems to break into two parts: the easy raillery of the shop and the savage world lurking outside. But the explosive ending merges them seamlessly, proving again that, in the world of contemporary crime fiction, Rendell really is top dog.

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