The Books
New York Times bestselling author Charles Todd brings back Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge in another riveting mystery set in post–World War I England Lancashire, England, June 1920. In a house with a red door lies the body of a woman who has been bludgeoned to death. Rumor has it that two years earlier, she’d painted that door to welcome her husband back from the Front. Only he never came home.
Meanwhile, in London, a man suffering from a mysterious illness first goes missing and then just as suddenly reappears. He is unable to explain his recovery.
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England, 1916. Independent-minded Bess Crawford's upbringing is far different from that of the usual upper-middle-class British gentlewoman. Growing up in India, she learned the importance of responsibility, honor, and duty from her officer father.
At the turn of the century, in a war taking place far from England, two soldiers chance upon an opportunity that will change their lives forever. To take advantage of it, they will be required to do the unthinkable, and then to put the past behind them. But not all memories are so short.
Late on a spring night in 1920, five boys cross the Yorkshire dales to the ruins of Fountains Abbey, intent on raising the Devil. Instead, they stumble over the Devil himself, sitting there watching them.
Hampton Regis, a small harbor town on the southern coast of England, is a most unlikely place for violence. Yet, one spring morning, a man is found on the strand so severely beaten that he slips in and out of consciousness.
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A LONG SHADOW finds Rutledge turned from hunter to prey when a mysterious stalker forces the Inspector to revisit painful memories from the war and confront unfinished business there.
Charles Todd returns to the world of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Ian Rutledge. This time the embattled Inspector has met his match hunting a brutal killer across a frozen hell and the one witness who may have survived a crime of cold treachery.
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The Great War is still raging in the autumn of 1916 when Francesca Hatton's beloved grandfather dies on the family estate in England's isolated Exe Valley. Now a stranger has shown up on her doorstep, accusing her grandfather of being a murderer.
But that past bleeds into the present in a complex murder case that calls into question his own honor...and the crimes committed in the name of God, country, and righteous vengeance.
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In Osterley, a marshy Norfolk backwater, a man lies dying on a rainy autumn night. But while natural causes will surely claim Herbert Baker's life in a matter of hours, his last request baffles his family and friends.
Rutledge is a man walking on the edge of insanity, finding both relief and more madness in his work as a Scotland Yard investigator. Now this series takes Rutledge to the one place that most threatens the balance of his mind: his past.
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SEARCH THE DARK, the latest in his post- World War I series featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge, sends the war-damaged detective to a small Dorset town to locate two missing children
Inspector Rutledge makes his greatly anticipated second appearance, in a book with the kind of richly developed characters, layered plot, and luminous British village scenes.
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In 1914, Ian Rutledge left a brilliant career at Scotland Yard to fight in the Great War. Now, in 1919, he is back, burdened with a heavy secret: he is still suffering from shell shock.