The Black Ascot by Charles Todd

The Black Ascot: An Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 343 pages including Acknowledgements.

Note: the title of the 21st book in Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge Series, The Black Ascot, is a reference to the 1910 Royal Ascot Race Meeting. The Royal Ascot Racing Grounds were founded in 1711 by Queen Anne, and the annual meet is patronized by British royalty and aristocracy as one of the premiere social and fashion events of the year. But the 1910 race meeting, following just after the death of King Edward VII, when the nation was still in official mourning, became known as the "Black Ascot" because all of the attendees showed up dressed in black.

A grateful ex-convict provides Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge with information about a recent sighting of Alan Barrington, a murder suspect who has eluded Scotland Yard for eleven years. Rutledge is skeptical but eventually decides to pass on this tip to his superior, Chief Superintendent Jameson. Jameson is an old fashioned copper and neither likes nor trusts Rutledge, who is upper class and has education and social connections --- and who still suffers from the traumatic after affects of his experiences in the Great War.

Jameson assigns Rutledge the task of reviewing the Barrington case files one more time. Alan Barrington was one of a group of Oxford students who courted Blanche Richmond. Blanche married Barrington's close friend, Mark Thorne, who made a career in banking. But Thorne lost all his money, and his clients' money, in a series of bad investments, and killed himself. Alan Barrington became obssessed with the idea that Mark had been set up with bad advice, and deliberately ruined by a man who coveted his wife, Blanche. When Blanche subsequently married Harold Fletcher-Monro, Barrington was suspected of tampering with Fletcher-Munro's automobile, on the day of the Black Ascot. Driving home after the race, Fletcher-Munro lost control of the car on a clear, straight stretch of country road, veered into a copse of trees, and crashed. 

 Although Fletcher-Munro suffered crippling injuries, it was Blanche who died. The police concluded Barrington tampered with the car with the intention of causing the accident, but he fled the country before he could be arrested, and despite all their efforts, the police were never able to trace him.

Rutledge decides he needs to find out more about Barrington. He's convinced the man could not have disappeared so thoroughly and for so long without assistance. So he begins to interview Barrington's friends and associates.

When he returns to London, Rutledge answers a knock on the door of his flat and a gun explodes in his face. He is rushed to the hospital, but when he regains consciousness he can't remember anything  of the incident. But a service revolver is found on the doorstep. Coupled with his suspicions that Rutledge has been covering up recurring episodes of shell shock from the war, Jameson assumes Rutledge failed at an attempt at suicide. At that time, shell shock was seen as a sign of cowardice, and suicide as a disgrace. Jameson suspends Rutledge from duty, officially to allow him time to recuperate, but really as a prelude to a forced resignation one the furor had died down.

The Yard doesn't know everything about Rutledge's shell shock however; they don't know about the voice of the dead soldier that he hears in his head. But the ghost of Hamish accompanies Rutledge everywhere, sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, but always present and commenting on Rutledge's investigations.

Rutledge knows the only possible way to save his job is to find Barrington. But now on medial leave, he must work alone and with time running out, to find answers.

Fans of Ian Rutledge know that Charles Todd is a pen name for an American mother and son writing team. The Todds' breadth of knowledge about World War I and its aftermath for Britain is extraordinary, particularly the war's insidious effects on the soldiers who fought it and the country they returned to.  Another author with similar insight into the experience of the Great War is Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs Series.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from Criminal Element.com.

Cliick HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Journal of Books.

The Gate Keeper by Charles Todd

The Gate Keeper: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 306 pages

Number 20 in the long-running historical mystery series by the mother-and-son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd, two of a very few American writers who can credibly produce a classic British crime novel.

It's December 1920, and after a long day celebrating his sister Frances’ wedding, Inspector Ian Rutledge drives into the night in a forlorn attempt to stave off nightmarish flashbacks of his "bad war" experiences in World War I. Even though the trenches are four years behind him, Rutledge still suffers the effects of trauma. What we know today as PTSD was then called "shell shock," and seen as a stigma and a sign of cowardice to be concealed at all costs.

Then Rutledge runs out of his nightmare and into another in the middle of a quiet country lane where he finds a stopped car, a body, and a young woman whose hands are covered in blood. The victim, Stephen Wentworth, was a quiet but well-respected Navy veteran who came home to run a bookshop he had purchased previously in the ancient Suffolk village of Wolfpit.  A gentleman with private means whose family had lived in the area, he had no enemies but no close friends either. The young woman, Elizabeth MacRae, was an acquaintance who sometimes visited her aunt in Wolfpit. Wentworth had escorted her to a dinner party with mutual friends a few miles distant. On their way back to Wolfpit, Miss MacRae claims, a man had stepped in front of the car on a lonely stretch of road, forcing them to stop. When Wentworth got out of the car to ask if the man needed help, the unknown man had shot him point-blank, then turned away and vanished into the darkness, leaving no trace.

Intrigued, Rutledge pulls rank to handle the case himself, cutting out the local man, Inspector Reed, who --- along with the dead man's own parents --- seems to harbor some animus against Wentworth. But he finds few leads in the village, while Inspector Reed and Wentworth's parents do their utmost to impede and hinder his investigation. Then a second local man is murdered in the same manner; again a well-respected gentleman farmer and war veteran. Rutledge is convinced these are not random killings; the murderer is targeting these men for a reason, however obscure.

Rutledge’s investigations take him up one dead end after another, as he methodically sorts through the accumulating evidence. The pieces slowly come together in an unexpected and satisfying solution. The victim, his family, and the supporting cast of characters are as carefully drawn as Rutledge himself, the plot is convoluted yet believable, the setting atmospheric. Another outstanding mystery from Charles Todd.

Click HERE to listen to an interview with Caroline and Charles Todd, authors of The Gate Keeper.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the Criminal Element blog.

An Echo of Murder by Anne Perry

An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 286 pages

In this 23rd novel in Perry's Victorian murder mystery series featuring Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police and his wife Hester, Monk must solve a series of brutal, ritualistic murders targeting Hungarian immigrants in London.

A respectable middle-aged Hungarian immigrant is found murdered in his office in a warehouse on the Thames River in the Shadwell area of London. When Monk is summoned to investigate, he finds a gruesome, blood-spattered scene: seventeen candles dipped in the blood of the victim, and horrific wounds but no sign that the victim put up any resistance to his attacker. Monk wonders: did some deed committed in the past finally catch up with him; or could this be the work of an unbalanced mind? Or the result of local resentment and prejudice against foreigners?

An immigrant who is well known in the tight-knit Hungarian community offers to assist Monk and his men by translating for them as they interview those less fluent in English. Monk accepts the help grudgingly, as he suspects the translator hopes to further his own agenda by helping the police with their inquiries.

Suspicion falls on another recent arrival in the community: a doctor fallen upon hard times, who is known to Monk's wife as a colleague tending the wounded and dying during the Crimean War. Himself desperately wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, Fitz has only recently found his way home to England. He speaks fluent Hungarian from the years he spent there after the war. But his own wounds of body and mind have left him struggling with nightmares and blackouts, his nerves in shambles.

Three additional deaths, all identical with the first, has the community on the point of panic. When Fitz is found covered in blood, wandering dazed in the streets, Monk is forced to arrest him to prevent a mob from hanging him on the spot. And Monk cannot be sure Fitz did not commit the murders unless he can prove that someone else did.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Revenge in a Cold River by Anne Perry

An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 286 pages

In this 23rd novel in Perry's Victorian murder mystery series featuring Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police and his wife Hester, Monk must solve a series of brutal, ritualistic murders targeting Hungarian immigrants in London.

A respectable middle-aged Hungarian immigrant is found murdered in his office in a warehouse on the Thames River in the Shadwell area of London.
When Monk is summoned to investigate, he finds a gruesome, blood-spattered scene: seventeen candles dipped in the blood of the victim, and horrific wounds but no sign that the victim put up any resistance to his attacker. Monk wonders: did some deed committed in the past finally catch up with him; or could this be the work of an unbalanced mind? Or the result of local resentment and prejudice against foreigners?

An immigrant who is well known in the tight-knit Hungarian community offers to assist Monk and his men by translating for them as they interview those less fluent in English. Monk accepts the help grudgingly, as he suspects the translator hopes to further his own agenda by helping the police with their inquiries.

Suspicion falls on another recent arrival in the community: a doctor fallen upon hard times, who is known to Monk's wife as a colleague tending the wounded and dying during the Crimean War. Himself desperately wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, Fitz has only recently found his way home to England. He speaks fluent Hungarian from the years he spent there after the war. But his own wounds of body and mind have left him struggling with nightmares and blackouts, his nerves in shambles.

Three additional deaths, all identical with the first, has the community on the point of panic. When Fitz is found covered in blood, wandering dazed in the streets, Monk is forced to arrest him to prevent a mob from hanging him on the spot. And Monk cannot be sure Fitz did not commit the murders unless he can prove that someone else did.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Search The Dark by Charles Todd

Search The Dark: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 279 pages

Inspector Ian Rutledge is haunted by the horrors he witnessed on the battlefields of the Great War. Lurking in his head he hears the voice of Corporal Hamish MacLeod, a young soldier he was forced by the brutal military code to execute for refusing a direct order in battle. How long, he wonders, before that judgment rebounds on him?

Meanwhile, Rutledge tries desperately to pick up the pieces of his former job as a Scotland Yard Inspector. A dead woman and two missing children bring him to Dorset and the small town of Singleton Magna. Rutledge is dismayed to find another tormented war veteran is the chief suspect in the death of the woman, found lying in a field with her face battered beyond recognition. But the local police have failed to find the two small children supposed to have been with the woman, so Rutledge has been sent to assist with the search.

The local police Inspector believes that the ex-soldier saw the woman and the children from the train as he passed through Singleton Magna, and recognized his wife and children, presumed dead in a German bomb attack on London during the war. He was seen and heard searching for them and threatening his wife for deceiving him, so when the woman's body was discovered, the police arrested him.

But Rutledge realizes there are many discrepancies in the evidence. He questions whether the dead woman was really the man's wife, and whether there were ever any children present at all.  When another battered body is found buried in an isolated spot unlikely to be known to anyone without detailed local knowledge, Rutledge is convinced these murders have a local context that has to do with the private lives of the local gentry, who are not above using their privileged positions to interfere with the investigation for their own purposes. Someone is protecting a murderer. And an innocent man, undone by war and grief, will hang unless Rutledge can bring the crime home to the real killer.

The third book in the Ian Rutledge series, for those fascinated by World War One and its reverberating impact on the lives of those who survived the war only to be wrecked on the shores of a dark and desperate peace. Fans of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs  and Anne Perry's William and Hester Monk series may enjoy this.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.