Ruth Rendell's latest novel, The Rottweiler, is an oddly engaging tale of random murder and the quirky vagaries of modern urban life. It is an ensemble piece with an something of an omniscient perspective in terms of narration (which means that the narrative perspective jumps quite a bit from person to person), and Rendell manages to characterize each of her rather oddball characters with signature detail, occasional humor, and gentle pathos.

The story's rather elliptical center is an antique shop owned by Inez Ferry, a middle-aged woman who lives in the flat above the shop and rents the other flats in the building to a rather unusual lot of tenants. There's the mentally challenged day laborer, the flamboyant woman with her rather obnoxious "paramour" (whose name, of all things, is Perfect), and the friendly (though rather quiet) Jeremy Quick who rents the topmost flat. Rounding out the unusual cast is Inez assistant Zeinab, a beautiful Indian girl with a penchant for simultaneous dating, a love of expensive jewelry, an inability to tell time, and perhaps - just perhaps - a few secrets of her own.

The normal ebb and flow of this esoteric little corner of the world is disrupted by the latest murder by the so-called "Rottweiler," the serial killer so dubbed by the press because the first victim was discovered with a bite on her neck (although the bite was apparently not connected to the murder but to the woman's boyfriend). The killer's latest victim was discovered not to far from Inez' shop, and the police have been questioning people in the neighborhood to determine if anyone has any information about the mysterious figure seen running down the street after the killing. Those questions only become more pointed when Inez discovers a "souvenir" taken by the killer from one of the victims in one of her jewelry cases. She reports the discovery to the police, and official attention is quickly directed toward Inez' tenants: could one of them be the vicious killer?

What is intriguing about The Rottweiler is that despite its mystery novel trappings, it is ultimately far more of a character study than anything else. Rendell takes great delight in weaving together an intricate tale of these disparate characters with little in common but physical space (i.e., Inez' antique shop). And she also seems to enjoy reflecting the personal nature of interpersonal realities: that as prisoners of our own minds, we often have no idea what someone else is thinking, even though we think we know.

For example, consider beautiful Zeinab: Inez believes her to be a young innocent enjoying a bit of male attention (albeit from several suitors at the same time, all of whom seem willing to cough up some serious jewelry). Nothing could be further from the truth, in that Zeinab has no overbearing father who might stab her for going out to dinner with some man - she has a couple of kids and a boyfriend and is milking her beauty for as much as she can pawn (as she notes at one point, she regards her dating career is akin to that of a model - at a certain point, her looks will fail her and until then she plans to make as much as she can).