Three weeks later, when Williams' abandoned car is found vandalised in a nearby town and the suitcase of clothes he had left home with is discovered in a field pool, Wexford starts to suspect that there may have been a murder.

Things become more complicated when a number of young men are stabbed by teenaged girls belonging to a radical feminist group called ARRIA, whose logo is a human-headed raven.

After an ARRIA member whom he has interviewed is discovered strangled in the garden of the house where they hold their meetings, Wexford finally realises that someone in the group must have been involved in the Williams murder.

Wexford baits a trap for Sara, using her half-sister Veronica, and it emerges that it was these two "women" (in the eyes of ARRIA) who had been meeting secretly for months.

Ruth Rendell later reported in an interview with Anthea Davey for Red Pepper that she had "had a go at dotty militant feminism" in An Unkindness of Ravens and as a result "I was described by one women's magazine as the greatest anti-feminist since Dashiell Hammett".