Two bodies are discovered in rapid succession in the seemingly quiet village of Flagford. One has been buried on the edge of woodland for 11 years, the other hidden in the cellar of a deserted house for eight. Neither can be immediately identified. As Chief Inspector Wexford and his colleagues struggle to attach names and histories to these piles of bones, the neighbours in Flagford prove unhelpful or downright obstructive. A well-known novelist, living in a curious ménage à trois with his past and his present wife, appears increasingly anxious to avoid Wexford’s questioning. Attempts to link the bodies to people gone missing from the area lead down dead ends. Eventually, it is only the newspaper serialisation of a woman’s account of a childhood scarred by the disappearance of her father that sets the police on the path to understanding how the deaths occurred.

The Wexford novels have long combined standard elements of cosy English crime fiction (a wise and avuncular detective, a rural or small-town setting) with the unsettling awareness of secrets and sudden violence that characterises Ruth Rendell’s books (including those under her Barbara Vine pseudonym). The best of them have made fruitful use of tension between the cosiness and the darker emotions they gradually unveil. One of the many strands in this latest story involves a novel attributed to one writer rather than another. Nobody familiar with Rendell’s work could make the mistake of assigning Not in the Flesh, with its sense of malice and menace forever lurking in the wings, to any author other than her. It is not from the top tier of the Wexford tales, but it is gripping and memorable nonetheless.

NOT IN THE FLESH by Ruth Rendell
Hutchinson £17.99 pp266
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (inc p&p)

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