The Woman in the Water: by Charles Finch

The Woman in the Water: A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series by Charles Finch --- 292 pages

American author Charles Finch has taken a fresh approach to his long-running Victorian mystery series featuring an aristocratic ex-member of Parliament who finally takes up his long held ambition to become a private detective.

This prequel, set some twenty years prior to the original series, gives us a look at the young Charles Lenox, just come down from Oxford and taking up residence in London.  As the younger son of a baronet, Charles has no preordained occupation --- his brother Edmund is the heir to their father's title and estate. As a gentleman with a private income and a university degree, however, the range of socially acceptable occupations for Charles is actually quite limited: the Army, the Church, government service such as the diplomatic corps or a seat in Parliament, or (just barely beginning to be tolerated) some very discreet connection with investments in the City. 

But Charles, to the dismay of his family and friends, is fascinated by crime. So when he finds a letter published in one of the London tabloids, in which the writer boasts he has committed the "perfect"murder, and intends to murder again in one month, so that people are forced to pay attention, Charles takes it as a personal challenge. He and his valet, Graham, connect the boastful letter to the body of a young woman found strangled inside an old trunk washed up on an island in the Thames. So far the police have failed to identify the victim, much less her killer. Lenox pulls strings to see Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of London's fledging police force at Scotland Yard. His offer of assistance is  initially declined, but when a second murder does occur, and Lenox is able to prove that it is linked to the first, Mayne offers him a role in the investigation. 

Click HERE to read an interview with the author talking about The Woman in the Water.

Click HERE to read the review in Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review in Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review in the Washington Post.

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.

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.

A Fine Summer's Day by Charles Todd

A Fine Summer's Day: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd --- 358 pages

Charles Todd is the pseudonym of a mother-and-son writing team that have produced sixteen critically acclaimed historical mysteries about Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, who returns from the trenches of the Great War suffering from amnesia and severe shell shock - what we now know as post traumatic stress disorder - and desperately tries to reclaim his sanity and previous career at Scotland Yard. In each book Rutledge is set to solve a murder that requires him to confront ghosts from the past that continue to haunt him.

Now in the seventeenth book in the series, the authors have written a prequel, allowing us to see Rutledge when he was young and undamaged in mind and body, filled with hopes for a future with the sweetheart he adored. And all the while he is working to solve a series of seemingly unrelated murders spread across England. The method is similar in each case, but the victims seem to have nothing in common. Only by defying his superior, doggedly following his own instinct,s and ignoring the siren call to arms, does Rutledge finally discover the motive, and thus the identity, of the murderer.

A gift to fans of the series and a wonderful place to start for readers who are meeting Ian Rutledge for the first time.

Click HERE to read the New York Times review of A Fine Summer's Day.

Click HERE to visit the author's web site and view a timeline of the series with short descriptions of each book in sequence.