Just Finished Reading Ruth Rendell's Wolf to the Slaughter

The 1967 book Wolf to the Slaughter is the third in English writer Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford crime mystery series.  Once again the chief police inspector for the Sussex town of Kingsmarkham is confronted with a disappearance, this time of Anita Margolis, the sister of an eccentric, celebrated artist.  An anonymous note alluding to her murder puts Wexford on the hunt for her body and the killer...and down a frustrating path of investigation as different witnesses, each with their own secrets to hide, point him to dead end after dead end.  Mike Burden, who has been Wexford's subordinate inspector throughout the series so far, has more of a role in this story...but his character becomes judgmental and envious, different from the way he was earlier portrayed...while Wexford himself comes across as more sagely and gentle.  A new character, young detective Mark Drayton, takes up a great portion of the narrative as he falls for the charms of Linda Grover, a poor shop-owner's daughter.  That this subplot seemed important for the author to insert into the story and dominate it so much made me suspect that there was more to it under the surface...

In most mystery series, the sleuth detective solves it while the other characters...along with the reader...are looking in a completely different direction.  With the Inspector Wexford series, however...and especially Wolf to the Slaughter...the solution is just as likely to be stumbled upon through good luck as through superior deduction and observation.  In other words, I'm not at all coming to any sense of respect for Inspector Reginald Wexford as a crime solver...surely in subsequent stories he will play a larger role in tackling the mysteries.  This was my least favorite of the Inspector Wexford books so far, and partially because I had early on correctly suspected the fate of that aforementioned character of Anita Margolis and the undue emphasis on the seemingly irrelevant subplot involving Drayton and Linda.  Oh well, there's always the next book, which I will be starting in a couple of days...