ROOTS OF EVIL

A third outing for Chief Inspector Morrissey of Malminster Township (In Stony Places, etc.) begins with the tragic but seemingly innocent death of hard-working architect-town planner Richard Simms—in a car crash brought on by a heart attack. But his widow Claire is sure there's something more behind his death—a feeling reinforced by the disappearance of his briefcase and an anonymous telephone threat to her young children. Meanwhile, Morrissey and capable sidekick Barrett are working on incidents of race hatred violence that are slowly emptying a neighborhood built on potentially valuable land—land coveted by a corrupt band of town planners, aided in no small way by their spy in the police department. Mitchell's sensitive treatment of the domestic lives of her heroes and villains is as artful as her skill at weaving all the dangling threads of a complex puzzle into a coherent, totally compelling whole. A can't-put-it-down gem of a British procedural.