Charles ToddReviews

I liked it. It's grittier and heavier than some in the series. There's a pervasive theme of evil in the countryside. As usual, no one wants to tell Inspector Rutledge their secrets. This stretches out the story-telling a bit too long for me. Still worth reading.½

I do love a good British murder mystery. Written in 1996, this is the 1st book in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, of which there are currently 19, apparently. A friend of mine brought this series to my attention, so I thought I'd try it. For some reason I couldn't pay attention the first several times I tried to listen to it. Maybe it was knowing I had three other audiobooks downloaded competing for air time. Maybe it's the melodic sound of Samuel Gilles voice, or the British accent, although that doesn't typically interfere with my concentration. Maybe I just had a lot on my mind. But once I resolved to listen all the way through it was actually rather riveting. The time is just post WWI, and Inspector Rutledge, while trying to solve a mystery, is struggling to adjust to life after having been a soldier in France. I don't want to spoil it for you so I'll stop there.

A good read, maintains interest and suspense, well constructed. I've read two of his Inspector Rutledge novels now but will take a break.

A good read, kept up the enthusiasm, great detail and suspense.

Another very likeable part of this series as Rutledge is called in to help solve the multiple murder of a family and the missing 6th of one of the sons. It is suspected that the missing Josh is the murderer or the brother of the Father who was killed. It turns out that it was the estranged former husband who was jealous of the man who married his wife while he was missing in the war. As Kirkus states, not one of the best in the series, but a lot to like nonetheless.

KIRKUS:
Who will find ten-year-old Josh Robinson first, the killer who slaughtered the rest of his family or Scotland Yard’s Inspector Ian Rutledge and his familiar ghost Hamish?

Urksdale is unprepared for the carnage at the Elcott farm, where most of the family lies dead, apparently without a struggle. When Inspector Rutledge arrives, he finds most of the Lake District village searching for young Josh, who either escaped the massacre or caused it. Put up at the local B&B, where he’s drawn to the wheelchair-bound caretaker Miss Fraser, Rutledge learns of the complex beginning to the Elcott marriage. Thinking herself a widow whose husband Hugh Robinson was missing in action, Grace married Gerald. Then Hugh returned and agreed to let his pregnant former wife and two children stay with Gerald. But now Hugh, distraught over the loss of his family and the presumption that his son Josh is responsible, attempts suicide, while Grace’s sister Janet, who has reasons of her own to want her sister dead, insists that Grace was terrified of Gerald’s brother Paul. Intent on finding Josh before he freezes to death, Rutledge begins climbing the Fells as the ghost of Hamish, the soldier he was forced to execute in the Great War, struggles to point him toward the truth.

A slow beginning and melodramatic trappings put this a notch below Todd’s most compelling work. Nonetheless, Rutledge and Hamish (A Fearsome Doubt, 2002, etc.) remain two of fiction’s best antiwar spokesmen.

Enjoyed the claustrophobic setting of the seaside village, with the weight of the past bearing down on everyone. Hamish begins to feel like an interruption to me. There were plenty of murders and an adequate cast of interesting characters to choose your murderer from. Somehow I was a bit put off by the ending, though all the groundwork had been laid, somehow just didn’t feel satisfying.

enjoyed it. The characterization and the basic plot were enjoyable, but it is the main character that elevates it above the average series

Mystery

First is series about Inspector Ian Rutledge. A surprise ending in learning that a young woman who was known to be timid and shy had a dual personality. Her other personality was Helena, a step sister killed long ago as a child. Google Books: Ian Rutledge returns to his career at Scotland Yard after years of fighting in the First World War. Unknown to his colleagues he is still suffering from shell shock, and is burdened with the guilt of having had executed a young soldier on the battlefield for refusing to fight. A jealous colleague has learned of his secret and has managed to have Rutledge assigned to a difficult case which could spell disaster for Rutledge whatever the outcome. A retired officer has been murdered. Rutledge, fighting the torment of his illness goes to investigte. As he digs into the lives of the villagers, the witness who disturbs him most is a war-ravaged ex-soldier, who chills Rutledge with the realisation that he could become like this man.

(2010) Plodding through 2nd in series. Last 1/3 did pick up as Bess tries to solve who killed the wife of one of the soldiers she has treated at the front. One of that soldier's friends is implicated and later charged with the murder. Since she has no real authority and is not really a private detective, Bess is always one or two steps behind actually doing anyone any good. Kirkus: Achance encounter engenders more danger than a World War I battlefield.

Kirkus: As Waterloo Station teems with soldiers en route to their regiments in France and loved ones bidding tearful farewells, Bess Crawford, a nurse returning to the fray after escorting a badly burned Meriwether Evanson to hospital, recognizes his wife from a photograph the pilot clung to. A distraught Marjorie Evanson is being rebuffed by a member of the Wiltshire Fusiliers. Later, back in France, Bess learns from a newspaper clipping that Marjorie died that very day?she was stabbed, then thrown into the Thames. Did that Fusilier murder her? Bess thinks her information will help Scotland Yard, but it doesn?t, and when she hears that Evanson committed suicide when advised of Marjorie?s infidelity, she begins her own inquiries. At length she turns up two sisters?one who loathed Marjorie, the other determined to find out who her lover had been?and a handsome platonic friend of Marjorie who craved more intimacy than she could offer. He falls under suspicion, confesses and is set to hang, but Bess, abetted by Simon, her father?s former batman, persists in her sleuthing. There?ll be another possible suicide, a near-fatal knifing and many trips between French battlefields, London and Great Sefton before Bess herself comes under attack and Scotland Yard must reconsider its conclusion.

Bess (A Duty to the Dead, 2009) is dogged, implacable and headstrong in the way of Victorian heroines, and mired in a plot the author?s more capable detective, Ian Rutledge, would dispatch in half the time with twice the brio.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-06-079178-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

(2002) Ian Rutledge & his pesky sidekick Hamish are called on to solve the murders of 3 WWI veterans with no apparent connection except for PTSD or shell shock as it was known then. Before he even gets to investigate the widow of a convicted murderer, Ben Shaw, wants Ian to look at his case again after Ben was hanged for the offense 7 years ago. This proves to be a red herring as Ian later learns that that case was righteous. The new case proves more sticky, until late in the book, Ian finds that the wife of a currently suffering vet, was using the 3 to practice killing her spouse to put him out of his misery. KIRKUS: As if being bedeviled by Hamish, the ghost of the Scotsman he found it necessary to execute during the Great War, weren't guilt-inducing enough, the Yard's Inspector Ian Rutledge now has to deal with the widow of Ben Shaw, the man he sent to the gallows seven years ago, in 1912. Shaw never killed those old ladies, she says, and she has proof: a brooch from one of them she found tucked in a neighbor's drawer. Nudged on by his conscience, Rutledge attempts to reopen the case, but his superior, Supt. Bowles, who rose to power on the strength of the conviction, first packs him off to Kent to solve a rash of new murders in Marling: three ex-soldiers, who returned from the war disabled and died on desolate country paths after ingesting laudanum-laced wine. While he's in Marling, Rutledge calls on Elizabeth, the widow of another war casualty, his best friend, who is chary about admitting to a new romance, and dines with Raleigh Masters, a raging, moody amputee, and his despairing wife. Then who should reappear but the widow Shaw, in full whine, and worse yet, a German officer Rutledge thought he had left for dead on the battlefield. Beset on all sides�and even from the backseat of his car, where Hamish has taken up residence�Rutledge must exorcise not only a village's demons but his own as well.If everyone would read just one book, any book, by Todd (Watchers in Time, 2001, etc.), and pay close attention to what he's saying, there would never be another war.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002ISBN: 0-553-80180-5Page Count: 304Publisher: Bantam

(2007) Scotland Yard is asked to assist on the apparent murder of a local priest which appears to be connected to a petty theft of church funds. It quickly is determined that a strong man from a side show is the culprit and he is quickly arrested. Ian Rutledge doesn't think everything adds up and pursues the case beyond his superiors' wishes, as usual. He and Hamish discover that the priest had an obsession with the recent Titanic sinking and its survivors. A local gentry is drawn into it when it is determined that the wife of one of his sons was on the ship when it went down, but Rutledge finds that she may not have even been on the ship. Turns out the the gentry's sons and he had murdered the wife and covered it up by making it appear she was one of the disaster's victims. The priest was murdered as it appeared he was getting too close to the truth. KIRKUS: Two weeks after the fete at St. Anne's in the Norfolk village of Osterley, Father James lies dead in the rectory. Although Inspector Blivens thinks robbery was the motive�the fete proceeds are gone¥Father James's bishop, not so sure, asks Scotland Yard to pop around. The Yard sends off Ian Rutledge, recovering from a shoulder wound in the line of duty and still deviled by his memories of service in the Great War and the apparition of dead soldier Hamish MacLeod. Blivens quickly takes into custody Matthew Walsh, the fete's strong man, but further inquiries lead Rutledge to Lord Sedgewick, the local squire; his sons Arthur and Edwin; Priscilla Connaught, the only villager who truly hated Father James; May Trent, a survivor of the Titanic, to whom Father James bequeathed a picture of Arthur's late wife Virginia; and the squire's former chauffeur, Herbert Baker, a parishioner of Mr. Sims at Holy Trinity, who nevertheless insisted on talking with Father James on his deathbed. There'll be another homicide, a trek around the countryside, the revelation of an old murder, and endless cups of tea before Rutledge, exhausted and aching, painstakingly assigns blame for all three deaths, cranks up his automobile, and heads back to London with the ever-present Hamish haunting him from the back seat.A spot-on recreation of the 1919 period, some wily use of the Titanic tragedy and villagers' xenophobia, and the most persistent plaguing by a ghost since Macbeth. Todd fans (Legacy of the Dead, 2000, etc.) will queue up for this one.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2001ISBN: 0-553-80179-1Page Count: 339Publisher: Bantam

(2000) Another good one as Rutledge tries to solve the apparent murder of a woman who leaves behind a child. Or did she? Or is it the woman they think it is? Is it even a woman? Again, I like the way that Todd uses PTSD for all of the WWI vets who are involved in this case. We also learn a lot more of the reason Hamish haunts Rutledge. Rutledge was Hamish's superior who had to order his execution during the war for desertion. KIRKUS:Apt to keep to herself at the best of times and isolated all the more cruelly from the Scottish village of Duncarrick by the death of the aunt she went to live with, Fiona MacDonald is easy prey for a series of poisonous letters charging that the son she's claimed was left fatherless by WWI never had a proper father to begin with. And when an equally anonymous counter-letter defends Fiona against the charge of harlotry by asserting that she'd taken the boy from his real mother after her death, the constabulary investigates�and finds enough evidence to jail Fiona for murder. Her refusal to mount a convincing defense only sets the town more harshly against her, and her situation seems desperate until the arrival of troubled war veteran Inspector Ian Rutledge (Search the Dark, 1999, etc.), ordered this time to investigate the disappearance of imperious Lady Maude Gray's suffragist daughter Eleanor, who just might be the real mother of the child Fiona's been raising. Rutledge, literally haunted by the familiar spirit of Hamish MacLeod, the corporal he'd unwillingly executed for cowardice on the French front, is horrified to discover that Fiona was MacLeod's fianc?e¥and that's only the first of many unpleasant discoveries he'll make in this richly tangled mystery, which continues to borrow its storytelling conventions from the 1919 period of its setting.More Q&A than a season with Regis Philbin, but the creeping drive toward Todd's powerful climactic revelations will make it all worthwhile for readers who go the distance.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000ISBN: 0-553-80168-6Page Count: 320

(1999) Really like Rutledge & Hamish. Here he tries to prove that the man arrested for the murder of a woman he had seen at a train station was actually somebody else murdered by some one else. KIRKUS:It's the end of WWI and Inspector Ian Rutledge is back at his Scotland Yard job�physically uninjured but plagued by the inner, nagging voice of dead soldier Hamish MacLeod (A Test of Wills, etc.). His first assignment takes him to the village of Singleton Magna in Dorset. There, bull-headed Inspector Hildebrand has in custody shell-shocked veteran Bert Mowbray, accused of killing a woman he'd seen on the train platform with two children, declaring the woman to be his wife. Mowbray's later search for her seems to have ended in a brutal killing, and now the search is on for the children¥and fast becoming a dead end. It soon develops that another person in the area is missing. In nearby Charlburg, Simon Wyatt, expected to follow in his father's illustrious political footsteps, has returned from the war with French wife Aurore and no ambition except to set up a small museum of Indian and Far Fast artifacts. His onetime near fiance Elizabeth Napier has brought him her London father's competent assistant to help with the museum. Now that assistant (Margaret Tarlton) has vanished, and Hildebrand refuses to exhume Mowbray's victim's body to verify her identity. Strangely enough, a body does surface; this time it's that of Betty Cooper, a maid who worked for a local farm family but had higher aspirations. Her death provides further unneeded complications¥until, with little effort on Ian's part, all the unlikely answers come to light. A bit livelier than the author's previous work, with plenty of suspense despite its unfocused plot, unreal people, and too- leisurely style. Best for those who like their mystery melodramas written the old-fashioned way.Pub Date: May 1, 1999ISBN: 0-312-20000-5Page Count: 288Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin'sReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999

(2009) Very good introduction to another WWI character, Bess Crawford who is a nurse who is on board the hospital ship Britannic taking care of a wounded soldier who dies as the ship is sunk by the Nazis. She is drawn into a family scandal and tries to determine who had killed a servant many years ago. These novels by the Todds are such a pleasure to read.KIRKUS:World War I nurse keeps a burdensome promise.Relinquishing for the moment Inspector Ian Rutledge (A Matter of Justice, 2008, etc.), the Todd writing partnership presents Bess Crawford, invalided home when the hospital ship she nursed on is shot out from under her. She's bent on relaying a dying message�matters must be set right¥from favored patient Arthur Graham to his brother Jonathan. Another matter, however, takes precedence for the Graham family: Peregrine, the Graham brother confined in an asylum since he was barely a teenager for murdering Lily the housemaid, is near death from pneumonia and needs nursing care. Providing it, Bess is struck by how rational Peregrine seems. Meanwhile, another village patient, a traumatized war victim who has fallen under her care, commits suicide¥or does he? When Peregrine regains his strength, he takes Bess on the run to help him recover his memory of Lily's death. A visit to the village rector reveals several other fatal calamities over the years that cast suspicion on other Graham family members: clubfooted Timothy, Mrs. Graham and, to Bess's dismay, the late Arthur himself. A gruesome denouement lays bare all the family secrets and misalliances and releases Bess from her deathbed vow to Arthur.Will readers miss Inspector Rutledge? You bet. But anyone who cares to loll in early-20th century English villages and mores and follow a plucky heroine as she confronts the stupidity of war will find solace in this old-fashioned mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009ISBN: 978-0-06-179176-5Page Count: 336Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollinsReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009

(1998) 2nd installment. Liked Rutledge a lot in this, but the story was a little weak. He tries to make heads or tails out of a very dysfunctional family that suffered the apparent suicides of two of its members and a third accidental death. Turns out that a murderer took out 2 of the 3 as jealousy ruled supreme.Kirkus: Scotland Yard's Inspector Ian Rutledge, still recovering from the ravages of his service in WW I, his thoughts haunted by the ghost of fellow soldier Hamish MacLeod, (A Test of Wills, 1996), is sent by Supt. Bowles to the village of Borcombe in Cornwall. Lady Rachel Ashford, of the influential Trevelyans, has asked for further investigation into the recent double suicide and accidental death within the family. Unearthing background, Rutledge finds that matriarch Rosamund Trevelyan, widowed three times, mother of many children, died of a laudanum overdose. Many years before, she'd suffered the accidental death of eight-year- old Anne, a twin to crippled Olivia, and later, the disappearance�never solved¥of five-year-old Richard. Now, the adult Olivia, a respected poet, and her brother Nicholas have been found dead¥of laudanum. Days later, their half-brother Stephen, hobbled by war injuries, falls to his death down the staircase at Trevelyan Hall. Meanwhile, Cormac Fitzhugh, son of Rosamund's last husband, wants to buy the Hall from the heirs, a prospect opposed by Stephen. Rutledge, undeterred by protests from the local doctor, police chief, family members, and retainers, tirelessly sorts through fact and legend to reach the truth. But he has more patience than sorely tried readers might as they untangle the snarl of family relationships and slog through an avalanche of high-flown, semimystical verbiage¥all augmented by the terser, Scots-accented dialogue between Rutledge and his inner voice. The long-dragged-out solution seems scarcely worth the effort. (Author tour)Pub Date: March 20, 1998ISBN: 0-312-17064-5Page Count: 304Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin'sReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998

(1996) Very good introduction to Rutledge, a WWI veteran with PTSD (shell shock) from the war. He functions pretty well, but has a voice in his head (Hamish) who is a much a character of the story as is Ian. Hamish MacLeod forces Ian to keep on the straight and narrow. The story is of a former Colonel Harris in the war who is murdered by shotgun. The main suspect is a former air ace Captain Wilton who the Home Office does not want found to be the murderer as he is a genuine war hero. Rutledge reluctantly comes to the opinion that the Captain is the culprit until he discovers that a local woman has mistakenly killed the Colonel, thinking that he had killed her sister by hit and run years earlier. She has taken on the second personality of her sister but the the 2 cannot coexist and the result is her suicide. KIRKUS: Returning from the Great War in 1919, Inspector Ian Rutledge is dispatched to the Warwick village of Upper Streetham to track down the killer of Colonel Charles Harris, shot from his horse but mysteriously landed on his chest. Except for heavily alibied malcontent Bert Mavers, no one seems to have anything bad to say about the squire: certainly not his loyal business manager Laurence Royston, his ward Lettice Wood, or her fianc? Captain Mark Wilton, who insists that his recent colloquy with Harris was anything but a quarrel. Besides, Rutledge's local colleagues tell him, how much stock can they place in the story of the quarrel, which depends entirely on the testimony of Daniel Hickam, half- mad from shell shock? As Rutledge pokes sedately among the embers of Harris's manse and the neighboring households�the investigation proceeds slowly, slowly, through endless conversations with nary a hint of violence before the suspects' secrets tumble out in the closing pages¥he wrestles with a secret of his own: his agonizing case of shell shock, which has cursed him with the nagging specter of Hamish MacLeod, a corporal whose only return from the war has been inside Rutledge's head. The 20th century hasn't happened in Upper Streetham, which seems to have been cast out of Rebecca, or in first-novelist Todd's deeply old-fashioned storytelling, which eschews the slightest impropriety in favor of the patient subtlety and circumlocution that held readers in thrall 70 years ago. A feast for the like-minded.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1996ISBN: 0-312-14431-8Page Count: 320Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin'sReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996Categories: HISTORICAL FICTIONSHARE YOUR

Interesting story good twists but dragged out a little.

This story revolves around two women . . . the missing daughter of a wealthy woman and the fiancé of Hamish, the haunting voice of the dead soldier in Ian Rutledge’s shell-shocked mind. The wealthy woman doesn’t believe the body found is her daughter, meanwhile there’s a poison pen letter campaign and going on and smearing Fiona as a woman who has stolen a child and killed the mother. Ian desperately wants to help Fiona but she’s keeping a secret about the child. Ian interviews many characters and re-interviews them before he can get Fiona to trust him and he figures out who is behind it.

Audiobook version from Audible. Abandoned after 20 minutes. Not my kind of book - thought it was historical fiction with action/adventure.

Good one! Wonderful narrator. We enjoyed this. Great characters and sense of place, the things I really look for in a book. Good mystery, surprising ending to me.

Another good Ian Rutledge story. He’s been given another difficult case to solve by his superior out in the Fens. Two seemingly unrelated murders by a mysterious “monster.” Hamish, the ghost from Ian’s WWI, is along to help him reason out the clues. Ian figures it's a trained ex-soldier, probably an assassin from the war and then has to figure out who he is and why these victims.

Rutledge investigates "cold" and recent murders in rural England.

Not the best of this series so far. I'm taking a break from Inspector Rutledge. I found myself really wanting the book to be done with at about the half way mark. I guess I'm just not that interested in what happens to the Inspector and Hamish, the voice in his head.

Story takes place after WWI and seven officers have agreed to meet in Paris with their cars and drive to Nice. Only 5 survived the war. One of the officers is in an accident on the twisty road to Nice covered in a thick fog and is hospitalized and loses his hand. His car is taken by the local preacher and involved in an accident, killing him. Ian Rutledge is sent to investigate. One by one the others are being killed and Ian himself was attacked (mistaken identity?) while investigating. I really like Ian and Hamish (his conscience) helping him puzzle through the investigation.

Interesting subplot with a sad 12 yr. girl trying to fill the shoes of her brothers killed in the war and her mother in those impoverished times.