Ruth Rendell's latest mystery

Ruth Rendell's new Chief Inspector Wexford novel begins as though she were writing an imitation of that chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh in which Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water. It is raining in Kingsmarkham.

It has been raining for weeks, and continues to rain for most of the novel. Each day the water creeps further across the Wexfords' back garden, and the chief inspector and his wife have begun to carry their belongings upstairs.

Though the floods are wide, they are not deep, so in Kingsmarkham police station the initial reaction is amusement when a distraught Katrina Dade, returning from a weekend in Paris with her husband, insists that her teenage son and daughter, Giles and Sophie, together with Joanna Troy, who was looking after them - all three good swimmers - must have been drowned, since they are no longer in the house.

The sub-aqua team, pleased to have something to do, dives in a few spots, finding nothing, as expected. But two teenagers and a 30-year-old woman have vanished, and Wexford cranks up the machinery of a police search.

His forebodings of what might be found become ever darker: the Dades turn out to be a highly dysfunctional family, while the investigation of Joanna Troy's life reveals some disturbing traits.

The Babes in the Wood is Ruth Rendell's 19th Wexford novel. It is not one of the best: the plot stutters oddly, and there is at times a surprising ignorance of the objects of everyday life - car registration numbers and the appearance of cannabis, for example.

But our familiarity with Kingsmarkham, with Wexford and his family, with his subordinates - Reg Burden and others - gives the book a splendid solidity, making it the equivalent of an adult comfort blanket.