The title of Rendell's fourteenth Wexford novel suggests its principal theme, carried out simultaneously in the crime that Wexford must solve and in his relations with his family and environment: the classical Greek philosophical fallacy that if she is veiled "you can recognize your own mother and not recognize her" — "something to do with all of us and our parents, and with knowing and not knowing."

The veils modern society imposes on its members prevent individuals from distinguishing between the ideal and the real, with results that are all too often tragic.

Rendell explores several of these in her most richly textured Wexford novel to date. Her primary concern is to lay bare the twisted psychological motives behind the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman garrotted in a shopping center parking basement almost before Wexford's eyes. She also addresses sensitive current issues: a hypocritical media...