Audio CD: New Wexford novel read by Christopher Ravenscroft.

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Product Description

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury - a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton sheet. The post mortem cannot reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs. Although it covers a relatively short period of time, the police computer stores a long list of missing persons. Men, women and children disappear at an alarming rate, something like 500 every day nationwide. So Wexford knows he is going to have a job on his hands to identify the corpse. And then, only about twenty yards away from the woodland burial site, in the cellar of a disused cottage, another body is found. The detection skills of Wexford, Burden and the other investigating officers of the Kingsmarkham Police Force are tested to the utmost to discover whether the murders are connected and to track down whoever is responsible.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #388747 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Released on: 2007-11-05
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.co.uk
The wait is over: here’s a new Wexford novel. And Not in the Flesh is one of the sharpest, most astringent outings for Ruth Rendell’s doughty copper in some time. Rendell's studies in dark psychology (which have at their centre characters who appear only in individual novels) are the most highly regarded among aficionados of her wok, but the unalloyed good feeling prompted by a fresh appearance for her long-term protagonist Inspector Wexford is something to be savoured, and we are once again in safe hands here.

A man taking his dog for a walk in a wooded area stumbles across a grim object -- a severed human hand. The body to which it belongs has been hidden from sight for years, as Wexford subsequently finds out. Of course, with the uncountable numbers of missing persons in police files, Wexford is well aware it will be an uphill struggle tracking down the identity of the body. Shortly after, in the basement of a disused cottage, another victim of violence is discovered, and Wexford and his reliable team find themselves attempting to discover connections between the murders.

Readers might wonder if the production of these utterly surefire Wexford books is an east task for Rendell (as opposed to the rigours of the grimmer psychological novels written under her own name, or the nom de plume Barbara Vine), but there's never a sense of the author on autopilot; this is professional, well-honed, engrossing stuff. --Barry Forshaw

Review
Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and his Kingsmarkham colleagues (End in Tears, 2005, etc.) deal with not one but two bodies of men whose relatives long ago gave up hope of ever hearing from them again.Jim Belbury's truffle dog makes the first discovery: a man interred 11 years ago in a drainage ditch. John Grimble and his friend Bill Runge had dug the ditch back when Grimble expected permission to replace the tumbledown house on Old Grimble's Field with four new homes. They filled in the ditch when permission was denied. DI Mike Burden, searching the boarded-up house, finds a second corpse, this one waiting eight years in its underclothes to be found. Ancient former neighbor Irene McNeil tells Wexford that her late husband Ron shot the intruder in self-defense when he brandished a knife, and for a time it seems that the killers may be easier to identify than the victims. New inquiries into open missing-persons cases and repeated conversations with other neighbors - especially dying fantasy novelist Owen Tredown and the two wives, present and past, who live with him - only deepen the mystery. Back in the present, Wexford's daughter Sheila, cast in the starring role in a film adaptation of Tredown's most famous book, tries to enlist her father in the battle against the circumcision of young Somali girls in the neighborhood - a episode that at least hints at a happy ending.Rich, tangled and as sharply observed as ever. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Inside Flap
'Ruth Rendell's books are not only whodunits but whydunits, uncovering the motive roots of murder' Mail on Sunday

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury – a human hand.

The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton sheet. The post mortem can not reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs.

Although it covers a relatively short period of time, the police computer stores a long list of missing persons. Men, women and children disappear at an alarming rate, something like 500 every day nationwide. So Wexford knows he is going to have a job on his hands to identify the corpse.

And then, only about twenty yards away from the woodland burial site, in the cellar of a disused cottage, another body is found.

The detection skills of Wexford, Burden and the other investigating officers of the Kingsmarkham Police Force are tested to the utmost to discover whether the murders are connected and to track down whoever is responsible.