Not in the Flesh (Chief Inspector Wexford Series #21) [NOOK Book]

Publishers Weekly

In addition to solving two long-ago murders, Chief Inspector Wexford is troubled by female genital mutilation in the local Somali community. The temptation would be to cut the subplot, but this abridgment retains the richness of the novel. Tim Curry's performance is splendid, even better than Daniel Gerroll's excellent performance of Rendell's End in Tears. Curry does a particularly marvelous job with the minor characters, such as the two wives-in-law of a local author, who cackle at the sexual innuendos of their own jokes. Then there's 84-year-old Irene McNeil, alternately supercilious and weepy. Throw in the obsessive Grimbles, on whose land the bodies were found; some migrant fruit-picking Roma; Wexford's family; Somali immigrants; and Curry somehow sounds like a full-cast audio. If only Wexford sounded less like his assistant Burden, the performance would be absolutely perfect. A Crown hardcover (reviewed online). (July)

Library Journal

The prolific Rendell (or Barbara Vine, depending on what you're reading) offers her 21st Chief Inspector Wexford novel. Readers watch as a truffle-hunting suburbanite and his dog stumble across a long-buried body on a vacant property. Upon investigation, Wexford and his team uncover a second murder victim in the basement of the abandoned house on the property. The crimes were committed so long ago that the bodies themselves yield few clues, but the neighbors all seem to have reasons to be cast in a suspicious light. Wexford embarks on an arduous probe in an effort to unravel the mystery, encountering along the way the usual odd assortment of characters. Interspersed in his investigation is an odd subplot involving the genital mutilation of young Somali immigrants in Britain. As always, Wexford endures modern (and in his opinion, less civilized) British society and patiently prods his suspects until they reveal all. Not quite as compelling in tone as some of Rendell's other works but complex enough to satisfy any mystery fan. Recommended for all public libraries.
—Caroline Mann

Kirkus Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the present volume, Wexford and his team -- the members and their little ways well known to Rendell fans -- have been called over from Kingsmarkham to nearby Flagford with its "somewhat too picturesque village center." Here a body, clearly buried years ago, has been discovered by a man and his dog out searching for truffles. It lies in land left untended ever since its owner, John Grimble, a cheesy builder, was refused planning permission to tear down the existing house and replace it with four of his own slipshod constructions. Wexford visits Grimble at home, accompanied by his colleague, the consummate clotheshorse Inspector Mike Burden ("charcoal trousers with a knife-edge crease and a stone-colored polo neck under a linen jacket"). And thus we enter the first of the book's many dwellings, the precise and evocative depiction of whose interiors and furnishings is one of Rendell's great gifts and always a means of showing her characters' souls. In this case we find Grimble and his wife, both only around 50 but resolutely embracing the lethargy of old age, "anchored to orthopedic armchairs, the kind that have back supports and adjustable footrests, placed in the best position for perpetual television watching."

Wexford and his troop find similar unloveliness and spiritual poverty as they visit additional people for questioning. Among these are the curdling snob Mrs. McNeil, a widow who moved with her late husband, for obscure reasons, from a grand house to starkly modern quarters that are dislocation incarnate; the Hunters, living in sweltering heat and near senility; a Somali refugee family, the Imrans, whose apartment in a council-housing tower block is neat as a pin and a scene of order -- yet they seem intent on effecting the genital mutilation of their five-year-old daughter. This last makes up a free-standing subplot providing both a dose of hideous suspense and a very Rendellian glimpse of the quandaries attendant on a multicultural Britain.

At the tangled center of the much-populated story are Owen Tredown, a bestselling author of fantasy novels set in ancient times who is dying of cancer, and his two wives. They are the former Mrs. Tredown, Claudia Ricardo, an aging hippy and "ravaged beauty," and her successor, Maeve, "small and round with a face like a pretty piglet's." There is something decidedly rum about her in particular, and Wexford feels "that if he had been shown a photograph of her and told that she was the matron of a notoriously cruel old people's home or the director of a brutal boot camp, he wouldn't have been surprised. It was all to do with her economical and clipped speech, the iciness in her light blue eyes, and the severe gray flannel suit that she wore." These three live in unwholesome propinquity in a vast and dreadful Victorian house, "unprepossessing, large, ill-proportioned, mainly of purplish-red brick, roofed in bright blue-gray slates and with Gothic ogee-topped windows of buff-colored stone. The front door might have been a church doorway, dark brown, black-iron-studded." As for the inside, it "confirmed Wexford's opinion that Victorian builders (architects?) had gone out of their way to make their interiors hideous." It is not to be expected that all is sweetness and light in this venue.

Before the first body is identified through the miracle of DNA testing, another one shows up, this, too, disposed of years ago, and matters become even more complicated -- matters I do not feel free to discuss for fear of revealing more than is honorable. As it happens, this is not one of Rendell's better conceived and constructed mysteries, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, while DNA testing is one of the few modern advances to leave Wexford unruffled, it has been a blow to crime novels, replacing sleuthing with waiting around for the results -- time spent, as here, in make-work. In the second place, the motive for the first murder is one that unquestionably fascinates writers but has never, to my knowledge, prompted a murder in real life. Rendell works valiantly to make the ins and outs of the commission of the crime -- crimes, I should say -- complex enough to be satisfying, but I can't say that she quite pulls it off.

Still, if this is not first-rate Rendell, there is much pleasure to be had from it, especially for old Wexford hands. We catch up on DS Hannah Goldsmith's relationship with Bal Bhattacharya, DI Mike Burden's wardrobe, DS Barry Vine's opera collection, DC Damon Coleman's trials as a black man, DC Lyn Fancourt's struggle with her weight and Wexford's to maintain his doctor-mandated regime of walking and taking a glass of red wine instead of a pint. We are clued in to Wexford's daughter Sylvia's acting career, and, last but not least, to the look and feel of England as it hobbles along in the first decade of the 21st century. --Katherine A. Powers

Katherine A. Powers writes the literary column "A Reading Life" for the Boston Sunday Globe and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.