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?
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