A Long Shadow

ISBN: 9780060786731
ISBN10: 0060786736
Imprint: Harper

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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.

Rutledge first encounters his unknown and unseen adversary after a dinner at the home of mutual friends on New Year’s Eve, 1919. Leaving before the other guests, he finds a brass machine gun cartridge casing on the doorstep. It’s like countless others he’s seen in the trenches—but what is it doing on a quiet London street, far from France? And this one has been engraved. Disturbed and intrigued, he pockets it.

Soon after, Rutledge is sent to the southern coast of England to help the local police capture a murderer. Work done, on a whim he drives to the cliffs high about the sea and walks out to the headland. Returning to his car, on the driver’s seat he discovers another engraved cartridge casing, the death’s heads on it marking it as a companion to the one he’d found in London. Rutledge is being followed—and to stay alive in the face of a dangerous, anonymous foe, he is pressed to the limits of his investigative skills. But there’s little time to protect himself, for he must look into a vicious attack on a village constable in the north, a crime with roots deep in the past.

Or is he being lured there for the coup de grace?