The Midnight Line by Lee Child

The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child --- 368 pages

The Midnight Line is the 22nd Jack Reacher thriller from Lee Child, and it may well be the best one he's written to date.  As one reviewer says, this is the one that breaks your heart, as Reacher confronts the true cost of war intersecting with the opioid epidemic.

The new story begins where Make Me (2015) left off. Reacher and Michelle Chang spend three days together in Milwaukee.  On the fourth morning, when he returns to the room with coffee, she's gone. Just a note left on the pillow. And he understands why.

So he gets on a bus and heads west. At a rest stop in a small sad town in Minnesota, Reacher takes a stroll to stretch his legs, He passes a pawn shop and in the window he sees a West Point class ring from 2005. It's tiny; a woman cadet's class ring. Why would she give it up? Reacher's a West Point graduate himself. He knows how hard she worked to earn the right to wear that ring. It's not something you'd let go of easily.

Reacher decides to trace the ring back to its owner. Not just to return the ring, but to make sure she's all right. If she's okay, he'll just walk away.

But the trail he finds leads, step by step, into a web of lies, and violence, and desperation. Eventually it leads Reacher to the desolate wilds of Wyoming and a ghost of a town called Mule Crossing. Where he crosses paths with a retired FBI agent turned private investigator from Chicago. Who knows all about this woman and what might have gone wrong. Reacher has his own kind of honor.  If she's OK, he'll walk away. If she's not - he'll stop at nothing to set things right.

Reacher's on a quest for justice. Don't get in his way.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times. 

Click HERE to read the review from the Washington Post.

Racing the Devil by Charles Todd

Racing the Devil: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 341 pages

This is the nineteenth book in Todd's historical mystery series set in the aftermath of World War I, as the survivors of the trenches and the families of the dead struggle to deal with their lingering guilt, horror and loss.

Ian Rutledge's promising career with Scotland Yard was interrupted when he volunteered for military service in France; but no one, himself included, was prepared for the brutality of the first modern, mechanized war. Rutledge barely survived, and suffers from what was then called shell shock but we now know as post traumatic stress. He returns to Scotland Yard, but finds investigating crimes intensifies the struggle to conceal his mental vulnerabilities. 

In this novel, Rutledge is called in to investigate a motor car accident that killed the rector of St. Simon's in East Dedham, Sussex. The accident occurred on a dangerous rural road during a lashing rain storm. The driver lost control, the car rolled, and the driver was ejected. But there are some odd circumstances. The rector's housekeeper says he left the rectory that afternoon on his bicycle to visit a dying parishioner.  That house was in quite the opposite direction to the road where his body was found. The parents of the dying man report that the rector never arrived there. The car that the rector was driving belonged to Captain Standish, and was taken without permission; neither then Captain or his servants were aware the car was missing until the police informed them. And the local bobby who was first on the scene found evidence that another car was involved in the wreck. 

Rutledge discovers that Captain Standish also had a hard war and returned home changed by his ordeal.  Just before the Somme offensive, Standish and six other young officers had made a pact: if any of them survived (which was doubtful) they would meet one year after the end of the war, to race their motorcars from Paris to Nice.  

Five had beaten the odds and survived the war; they met a year later in Paris and set out for Nice. But on the dangerous mountain road descending toward Nice, Standish had been stalked and run off a cliff by another car. He had barely survived, and had become a virtual recluse as a result. 

Rutledge suspects that Standish, not the rector, was the target of this attack. But why would anyone want Standish dead? The answer lies in the past, and begins with that chance meeting of seven young officers in June 1916. 

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read a review from the New York Times.

No Shred of Evidence by Charles Todd

Mother and son writing team
Caroline and Charles Todd

No Shred of Evidence: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 341 pages

The eighteenth book in the best-selling series by the mother and son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd.  Although the authors are American, they write two different mystery series, one featuring Ian Rutledge and the other Bess Crawford, both dealing with World War I and its aftermath, and both featuring British characters and settings. And unlike many American authors, they get the Brits and the pre-forensics detecting right.

No Shred of Evidence takes a reluctant Ian Rutledge back to the coast of Cornwall. This time he's been handed the case of four privileged young women accused of murdering a banker's son during a boating trip. The women say they were trying to rescue the young man --- no more than an acquaintance (ie. not their equal in the complicated British class system) --- from his sinking dinghy. Somehow in the mad scramble of trying to heave him into their boat without capsizing it, he was struck on the head by an oar. An unfortunate accident, no more. However an eyewitness, a local farmer (even further down the social ladder), accuses the women of attempted murder. Since the victim never regains consciousness, there's no one to refute the farmer's accusation. Then other violent attacks occur, complicating Rutledge's investigation. Slowly he assembles the jigsaw puzzle of old grudges and uncontrolled fury that is behind the attacks. But can he find the proof in time to save four women from hanging for murder?

Click HERE to read an interview with Caroline and Charles Todd from the Fort Worth TX Star-Telegram.

Click HERE to read a review from Military Press.

Click HERE to read a review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read a review from the Historical Novel Society.

Wings of Fire by Charles Todd

Wings of Fire: A Novel by Charles Todd (Inspector Rutledge Mysteries, Book 2) --- 306 pages

Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge returns in this second period piece featuring the desolate, shell-shocked survivor of the Great War (World War I). Superintendent Bowles, Rutledge's superior, jealous of his background and abilities, is trying to torpedo his career with the Yard. So while a Ripper-like killer is terrorizing postwar London, Bowles looks for a way to banish Rutledge from the city while Bowles solves the crime and gets the glory. He finds what seems like a heavensent opportunity to send Rutledge on a fool's errand. Lady Rachel Ashford is insisting that Scotland Yard send a man to investigate the proven double suicide of her cousins, Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney, and the accidental death shortly after of another half-brother, Stephen Fitzhugh, in the seaside village of Borcombe in distant Cornwall.

But what looks straightforward to start begins to unravel as Inspector Rutledge asks his penetrating questions. Soon Rutledge uncovers the sad story of Rosamund Trevelyan, unlucky in love, with her three dead husbands and two dead childen, followed by her own "accidental" demise. And now three more of her grown children have died. Because these deaths happened over many years, the local people never questioned --- but Retledge is questioning now.

Justice demands the truth be found. But what if the truth he finds is even more unbearable than the hell of not knowing?  Will the truth bring back the dead, or ease the grief of the survivors? Yet once Rutledge picks up the scent of murder, he is compelled to follow it to the end, driven not just by duty but by a relentless ghost from the past.  Daphne DuMaurier eat your heart out!

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

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read a review and an interview with the author from Crimepays.com.

A Test of Wills: A Mystery by Charles Todd

A Test of Wills: A Mystery by Charles Todd --- 282 pages

This is the first book in the critically acclaimed Inspector Ian Rutledge mystery series set in post World War I Britain, written by the American mother-and-son team of Caroline and Charles Todd, who publish under the pseudonym Charles Todd.

In many ways it's an old-fashioned mystery story eschewing explicit violence, sex and language.  In other ways it's a subtle psychological portrait --- not of the murderer as one might expect --- but of the Inspector, a survivor of four years in the trenches, suffering from what was then called "shell shock" (we know it today as post-traumatic stress disorder).

It s 1919, and the war has been won. Or at least people tell themselves that it's been won. But there is no happy homecoming for Inspector Ian Rutledge, who has spent months in hospital, shell-shocked and locked in a mortal embrace with the pitiless voice of Corporal Hamish McLeod, one of his men whom he had to execute for refusing an order during battle, under the pitiless military code of the time.

When his fiancee deserts him, Rutledge decides that the only way to save his sanity is to escape into his work. He conceals his fragile mental condition, and manages to get his old job and rank back at Scotland Yard. But Superintendent Bowles, his previous superior, is still jealous of Rutledge's brilliant pre-war reputation, still determined to destroy his career.  

Bowles sends Rutledge to investigates the murder of a popular colonel in Warwickshire but neglects to mention that the chief suspect in the case is a decorated war hero who has been received at Court and lauded by the Royal family.

The case is a political minefield. Charging a popular war hero with murder will create a storm of notoriety around the Inspector. Regardless of whether the trial results in a judgment of guilt or innocence, the political consequences will demand a scapegoat --- and who better than a war-damaged investigator who has lost his nerve?

Even worse, the crucial witness who can make or break his case is a another veteran suffering from severe shell shock that has never been recognized or treated. And as Hamish's voice eagerly points out, that grim fate could easily become Rutledge's own.

Click HERE for a review from Kirkus.

Click HERE for a review from the Paradise Mysteries blog.

Click HERE for a review from Bookotron.com.