Hunt the nipper
Harriet Waugh
ACID ROW by Minette Waiters Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 352, ISBN 0333907485 or the second time Minette Walters has chosen to follow Ruth Renclell's more recent Wexford novels in exploring public issues in the guise of a crime novel, but she does it rather more successfully. Rendell is inclined to find her subject matter in newspaper stories. So Harm Done deals with hidden domestic abuse, Road Rage is about environmental protest at motorway-building and Sinisola is primarily about ill-treated third-world servants. In consequence, the villains are so clearly marked out that there is little surprise about who has killed who and why. Even when Mrs Wexford is kidnapped things are signalled from a long way off.
Minette Walters handles things differently. In The Shape of Snakes, her previous novel, the embittered heroine, who has a distilled anger for her husband, investigates the death of 'Mad Annie', a black woman who suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Annie's life was made insupportable by her racist neighbours and her miserable death is covered up by racist police. But the repercussions of her death are so great that the novel expands into far more complex labyrinths. In consequence, the whodunnit element turns out to be a serious surprise. In Acid Row she tackles the issue of paedophilia.
Sophie Morrison, a young doctor, calls on a new patient, an old Pole with an asthmatic breathing problem, just as the community of a very deprived housing estate erupts into rioting. Rumour is rife that a paedophile has been rehoused on the estate and the house that Dr Morrison visits comes under siege as a child goes missing. As the siege gains momentum and becomes dangerous, a separate investigation starts to find the missing child.
The child, a ten-year-old called Amy, went missing while her mother, Laura, was at work. The situation is not straightforward. Amy's mother is on the skids: married to a much older solicitor, she had left him for one of his clients, a builder/property developer, and then she left the client. Homeless, she picked up a bus driver and when Amy went missing, was living with him and his ghastly children. The children resented her and bullied Amy. Suspicion falls on Amy's father and Laura's ex-lover. The possibility that one or both are paedophiles is explored while the mentally and emotionally retarded rioters turn murderous — somebody has reported seeing a child's face at a window — even as Dr Morrison fights for her own survival as things go horribly wrong in the barricaded flat.
Although Acid Row suffers from being a more formulaic work than the more impressive The Shape of Snakes, it is very enjoyable. It is also exciting. The not entirety convincing hero (a sort of black Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a huge, heroic, wise, athletic ex-con who takes on all the baddies on the estate and nearly saves the day. Not all of this is very likely. But there is enough authenticity about the rest of the happenings for this not to matter too much. And then for light relief there is the more traditional teaser about the fate of ten-year-old Amy Rogerson.
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