Minette Walters's ninth novel, Fox Evil , set in the seemingly bucolic English countryside, establishes a blistering new standard for contemporary suspense. When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in nightclothes and with bloodstains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner's investigation deems it death by natural causes, but the gossip surrounding James refuses to go away. Friendless and alone, James and his reclusive behavior begins to alarm his attorney, whose concern deepens when he discovers that his client has become the victim of a relentless campaign accusing him of far worse than the death of his wife. James is unwilling to fight the allegations, choosing instead to devote his energies to a desperate search for the illegitimate granddaughter who may prove his savior as he battles for his name-and his life. The title of Walters' latest fright fest comes from a peculiarly virulent kind of skin disorder, in which hair falls out in mangy clumps. It also serves as the delightful nickname of one of Walters' main characters in this compulsive page-turner, which puts a deranged spin on the conventional village cozy. The matriarch of a wealthy family is found dead in the garden, bloodstains near her night-gowned form. The chief suspect is her husband, Colonel James Lockyer Fox; suspicion against him grows even after he has been officially cleared by the coroner. From this traditional start, Walters' narrative takes detours: into the worlds of fox-hunting saboteurs and down-and-outers living in a caravan park just outside the village. She also throws in the colonel's attempts to reconcile with his illegitimate granddaughter. All this, against the backdrop of growing community hostility toward the colonel, makes for a novel that becomes increasingly intriguing as the reader realizes how the plotlines intersect. Walters, who has won both the American Edgar and the British Gold Dagger Award, is expert at ratcheting up suspense while she portrays credibly confused and terrified characters meeting their fates. Great psychological acuity in a hair-raising suspense story. Connie Fletcher Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Fox Evil is everything we expect from [Walters]: an insightful and slightly creepy tale of psychological suspense, elegantly written. -- Seattle Times , May 11, 2003 From start to finish, the suspense is unrelenting. The author goes from strength to strength. Fox Evil is outstanding. -- Romantic Times , June 2003 Minette Walters is the author of eight previous novels, including Acid Row , named one of Publishers Weekly 's Best Novels of 2002. Her work has been translated into thirty-two languages. JUNE 2001 THE FOX SLIPPED QUIETLY through the night in search of food, with only the occasional flash of his white-tipped brush flagging his presence. The scent of a badger set his nose quivering, and he skirted the piece of track where the territorial marker had been laid. A shy, nervous creature, he had more sense than to cross the path of a voracious fighter with powerful jaws and poisonous teeth. He had no such fear of the smell of burning tobacco. It spoke to him of bread and milk for himself, and pieces of chicken for his vixen and her cubs-easier plunder than a nighttime's wearisome hunting for voles and field mice. Ever suspicious, he stood for several minutes, watching and listening for alien movement. There was none. Whoever was smoking was as quiet and still as he. Finally, in trustful response to the Pavlovian stimulus, he crept toward the familiar smell, unaware that a rolled cigarette was different from the pipe he was used to. The illegal trap, a maiming device of metal teeth, sprang shut on his delicate foreleg with the biting power of a huge badger, tearing the flesh and snapping the bone. He screamed in pain and anger, lashing at the empty night in search of his imagined adversary. For all his supposed cunning, he hadn't been clever enough to recognize that the motionless figure beside a tree bore no resemblance to the patient old man who regularly fed him. The woodland burst with sound in response to his terror. Birds fluttered on their perches, nocturnal rodents scurried into hiding. Another fox-perhaps his vixen-barked an alarm from across the field. As the figure turned toward him, drawing a hammer from his coat pocket, the shaved tracks in the mane of hair must have suggested a bigger, stronger foe than the fox could cope with, because he ceased his screaming and dropped in whimpering humility to his belly. But there was no mercy in the deliberate crushing of his little pointed muzzle before the trap was forced open and, still alive, his brush was sliced from his body with a cut-throat razor. His tormentor spat his cigarette to the ground and mashed it under his heel before tucking the brush in his pocket and seiz