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| Not in the Flesh |
Searching for truffles in the woods adjoining a dilapidated cottage, a man and his dog unearth something that might be far less suited for culinary purposes — a human hand, or what remains of it. But when a subsequent post-mortem of the dug up body sheds light on nothing of importance other than the fact that it had been lain buried for perhaps a decade or so, wrapped in a purple-coloured shroud, it's up to Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, alongside his sidekick DI Mike Burden, to delve back into the past and connect seemingly unconnected dots to unscramble the knotty mystery. I must admit, Ruth Rendell's
Not in the Flesh had me excitedly turning the pages from start to finish. It had a lovely laid-back old-world charm about it, if a tad anachronistic for the time period the novel is set in, but almost evocative of Agatha Christie's by cleverly laying a pathway of clues that lead to a satisfactory (and realistic) denouement, even if tangential threads about gender, race, sexism in police force and female genital mutilation are cursorily pursued, with no real conclusion in sight.
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