Minette Walters gets better and better! In the tradition of Ruth Rendell, but with far more likable characters, Walters puts a unique stamp on her mysteries. Tough, compassionate Sophie Morrison, a young NHS doctor assigned to a housing estate popularly known as Acid Row, is trapped inside a house with a convicted paedophile and his monstrous, abusive father while a crowd flinging Molotov cocktails mills around loose outside, working themselves up to break in. A rumor about paedophiles moving into the neighborhood started by a disgruntled, misanthropic health visitor named Fay Baldwin has set off a chain reaction that will lead to several deaths and severe injuries to many others. Walters' technique is to tell the story in overlapping chapters, the riot set against the abduction of a ten-year-old girl named Amy Biddulph. Amy was seen on the estate, the rumor says, but was she, really? Is what happened to Amy totally separate from what is happening on the streets of Acid Row? Is she at the mercy of more sophisticated paedophiles---possibly her father and his best friend---who sell pornography on the Internet? Walters' use of this technique moves the story along at a fast pace, with the immediacy of events forwarded in police and other bulletins adding urgency to the action. She creates wonderful characters who remain with the reader long after the book is put away; these are no cardboard, 1-dimensional figures. Jimmy James, a small-time thief and would-be drug dealer, is the unlikliest of heroes, but, together with the old, enfeebled, arthritic, often senile dears of the calling network set up by Dr. Morrison, he's able to do what the police cannot---try to find her before she's raped or killed by the paedophile father-son family---and try to stop the dope-crazed teenager leading the pack of lager louts who want to kill the paedophiles...and anyone who get in their way, including Jimmy's endearing but volatile lady, whose impulsiveness and concern for her children was the catalyst for the riot. This is exciting storytelling, very visual, and calls out to be put on the big screen. Walters last, The Shape of Snakes, was a wonderful, heartfelt book, but Acid Row is even better.