THE BLOODING

Wambaugh's darkest nonfiction since The Onion Field: a sleek and steadily gripping chronicle of the rape/murder of two English girls and of the relentless manhunt for the killer, finally nabbed through the nascent technique of genetic fingerprinting. When pretty teen-ager Lynda Mann is found raped/strangled in November 1983 in the quiet English village of Narborough, police from the nearby county seat of Leicester mount a massive investigation. Led by bristly Inspector Derek Pearce, the 150-man murder squad follows up scores of leads, but a year later no probable suspect is in hand and the probe grinds to a halt. In July 1986, however, the killer strikes again—this time raping and strangling teen-ager Dawn Ashworth only a stone's throw from where he murdered Lynda. Moreover, this time the killer is apparently seen—and soon a churlish, slow-witted local boy, a kitchen porter, is confessing, albeit confusedly, to the killings. Meanwhile, however, British scientist Alec Jeffreys has devised a revolutionary new forensics technique whereby each person's unique (except for identical twins) DNA can be mapped into a distinct visual pattern. For the first time ever in a criminal case, Jeffrey's technique is applied, comparing the kitchen porter's blood with semen found on the two dead girls—and the shocker is that the DNA of the samples don't match: the kitchen porter is not the killer. Back to square one, Pearce and his men begin the greatest round-up in British crime annals, testing the DNA of the blood of over 4,000 men: Will the cops' biochemical net haul in the murderous sociopath who surely lurks in Narborough or one of its neighboring towns? A meticulous and suspenseful reconstruction that exchanges the sardonic humor of Wambaugh's recent work (The Secrets of Harry Bright, 1985; Echoes in the Darkness, 1987) for moralistic deep-delving into the suffering of the victims' families, the affectless sociopathy of the killer, and the gritty determination of the cops. A powerful and elegant police procedural.