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Overview
As Road Rage begins, Chief Inspector Wexford is walking through Framhurst Great Wood, just outside his beloved town of Kingsmarkham, for what he tells himself will be the last time. He can no longer bear to look at the natural beauty that will soon be despoiled by the construction of a new highway. Wexford rather despairs of the project; his more sanguine wife, Dora, is active on a committee to save the threatened land. Others are more desperate to achieve their end, and their means include the taking of hostages, including Dora, and the threat to begin murdering them. How Wexford and his dedicated team of police officers race against time to learn the identity of the kidnappers and discover the whereabouts of the hostages will rivet readers who delight in following the intricate details of an intensive police investigation. But, as in every Ruth Rendell novel, the mortal drama raises political and moral questions that are not resolved with the closing of the case, and that apply far beyond the limits of Kingsmarkham.Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Ruth Rendell can never be accused of writing cozy English mysteries. Even her more traditional detective novels starring Inspector Reginald Wexford are set in a gritty, contemporary Britain beset by unemployment, racial tension, and urban crime. In the absorbing and timely Road Rage, ecoterrorists protesting a new highway bypass take five hostages -- including Wexford's wife.—Dick Lochte
Publishers Weekly -
The latest Inspector Wexford tale (following Simisola, 1995) from the redoubtable Rendell has a spectacularly unexpected twist. His wife, Dora, usually a sensible but taken-for-granted background decoration, moves to center stage as a kidnap victim. It's all part of a plot by aggressive defenders of the English landscape to forestall a planned bypass (read superhighway) through some of the lovelier scenery around Kingsmarkham, Wexford's stomping ground. These terrorists on behalf of nature take a group of hostages (Dora being accidentally among them) and threaten to kill them one by one unless their demands to end highway construction are met. Wexford is not stayed from pursuing the villains with his customary thoughtful vigor, but Dora's involvement gives him a whole new perspective on her importance in his life, and his anguish is made extremely moving. It is as human drama rather than conventional mystery that Rendell's books usually excel anyway, and this is no exception. The machinations of the highway saboteurs may be a bit hard to swallow, and the plot is wound up with a rather mechanical adroitness; but such eternal questions as enduring marital affection and love of the English countryside are the engines that make this Wexford outing move in Rendell's usual absorbing way. (Sept.)Library Journal
In Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford mystery, opposition to a proposed bypass escalates into the taking of hostagesincluding the inspector's wife.Kirkus Reviews
Rendell's evolution from the unnervingly focused analyst of plausible psychoses to the more outward chronicler who uses crime to diagnose the ills of contemporary Britain—one of the glories of today's mystery fiction—continues in a masterful tale of eco- terrorism that chills Chief Inspector Wexford as none of his earlier cases have. In order to protest the building of an unsightly and disruptive new bypass around Kingsmarkham, a band of eco-terrorists calling themselves the Sacred Globe take five hostages and threaten to kill them one by one unless Her Majesty's Government agrees to abandon plans for the bypass. The hostages, kidnapped in an unusually inventive way, include an inoffensive older couple, an aspiring model, a teenaged boy, and Wexford's wife Dora, snatched on her way to visit her newest grandchild. Rendell places her hero's nerve-racking attempts to track Sacred Globe to their lair within a vast canvas that makes room for each of the victims' agonized relatives, half a dozen environmental organizations of subtly different stripes, a marvelously shaded group portrait of Wexford's troops—and a subplot involving a slain German hitchhiker, the discovery of whose body comes as an especially nasty surprise to readers so thorougly caught up in the other characters' issues and lives.Rendell's most probing and ambitious book since—well, since Wexford's Edgar-winning last appearance in Simisola (1995).
Book Details
Published
September 15, 1997
Publisher
Doubleday Canada
Pages
320
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780385256827