Review by New York Times Review
Lady Elizabeth, Shardlake's royal patron and the future queen, sends him to Norwich to investigate a delicate matter: A distant relative named Edith Boleyn has been murdered in a very obscene fashion and her husband is expected to hang for the crime. "The family name, the foul details of the crime - the pamphleteers will have the time of their lives," predicts a member of the court. Shardlake's orders are to ensure that justice is done. And if it isn't, he has Elizabeth's royal pardon in his pocket. Shardlake participates in a tense murder trial and visits a hellish prison where the condemned await execution - by hanging if they're lucky, by bloodier methods if they're not. And then he lingers in the countryside, struck by the rumbling unrest between displaced peasants and greedy landowners grabbing tracts of common land. Šansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window. He takes a good bit of his plot from the historical peasants' rebellion led by Robert Kett, who appears here as a roguishly romantic hero. The descriptions of Kett's great camp on Mousehold Heath are so vivid you can almost smell the sheep being roasted to feed the thousands of farmers and laborers who make up the rebel army. The historical detail is impressive, but what we remember best are the violent scenes of rioting farmers tearing down the loathed enclosures and the ugly glimpses of women and children being turned out of their homes. Don't believe those tapestries of pretty lords and ladies happily hunting unicorns: The Middle Ages were murder. An autumnal air of melancholy seems to hang over Charles Todd's elegant police procedurals featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard. As THE BLACK ASCOT (Morrow, $26.99) begins, Edward VII has just died and the fashionable socialites attending the 1910 Ascot races are shrouded in mourning. Alan Barrington uses the occasion to arrange a fatal motorcar accident for the man who drove his best friend to commit suicide, or so he believes. Barrington then disappears for nearly 10 years. When he finally resurfaces, Rutledge is sent to discreetly track him down. This reflective series always seems eager to get Todd's sensitive detective out of London and into the English countryside, where the reverberations of World War I are still being felt. In Merwyn, "a gray, bleak village" of lost souls, he finds a wife who thought she was a war widow and her veteran husband, who feels he might as well be dead. And in Hampshire, Rutledge visits a clinic where, staring at shellshocked victims, he sees his own traumatized face. By now I should know better than to continue reading a novel that opens with a telephone call in the middle of the night. It's usually a tipoff that the dialogue is going to be dreary. ("Hello.... Who is this? ... Hello. Hello.... Who is this?") Fiona Barton has written better books than the suspect (Berkley, $26), and I expect to read more of them in the future. But this one recycles familiar themes and old plot points. Kate Waters, a British journalist with amazing survival skills in a weakened industry, takes an assignment involving two teenage girls who have gone missing in Thailand. Since her own son, Jake, is roaming the world and rarely calls home, this case is bound to be a heartbreaker for her and a strain for any reader who doesn't want to plow through another weepy story about suffering mothers and their callous children. But it's my own fault. After all, I caught that middle-of-the-night phone call and I didn't hang up. Here's one for the Shooting Yourself in the Foot Department: THE MURDER PIT (Mira, paper, $15.99), a Victorian potboiler by Mick Finlay, who had the very good idea of spoofing Sherlock Holmes by creating a private investigator who is his exact opposite. Unlike that famed cerebral sleuth, William Arrowood is the detective of last resort, relying on instinct, impulse and sudden brainstorms to resolve distasteful cases for unsavory clients. Norman Barnett, Arrowood's faithful assistant and the narrator of this story, doesn't waste his breath describing bucolic country scenes. And if he and Arrowood should leave London, they're more likely to visit a working farm "with its attack dogs, its slaughter shed, its mountains of stinking dung." Arrowood shows real skill in dealing with the case of Birdie Barclay, who hasn't been heard from since she left home to marry a pig farmer. But Finlay has no sense of proportion. It's not enough that his hero is rude, crude and lacking in social skills. His personal hygiene is so appalling he's unable to eat or drink without soiling himself, so he pretty much smells like a barnyard. Here, have a napkin! MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The latest Ian Rutledge mystery, set in 1921, finds the Scotland Yard inspector on the trail of a man who appeared to have vanished 10 years earlier: Alan Barrington, the prime suspect in a high-profile murder. Now, it seems, Barrington has come out of hiding. But why? Soon Rutledge realizes that solving this decade-old cold case could also help him answer some pressing questions about himself and his memories of the Great War that still haunt him (and, as regular readers know, the haunting is not entirely metaphorical). The authors Charles Todd is the pseudonym used by a mother-and-son writing team have written 21 Rutledge novels, but they have never let the series settle into an easy formula, and they always keep the reader guessing. This one feels just as fresh as the early Rutledge novels (the series debuted with 1996's A Test of Wills).--David Pitt Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1921, bestseller Todd's solid 21st mystery featuring Scotland Yarder Ian Rutledge (after 2018's The Gatekeeper) finds Rutledge defusing a hostage situation he encounters by chance in an English village. One of the people involved reports having heard of a recent sighting of Alan Barrington, a fugitive from justice. In 1910, Barrington was suspected of intentionally damaging a motorcar whose subsequent crash near the Ascot racetrack claimed the life of Blanche Fletcher-Munro and badly injured her husband, Harold. Despite a wide net cast by the police, Barrington evaded capture. Rutledge gets permission to pursue the new lead and seeks out Harold, whom Barrington held responsible for the suicide of his close friend Mark Thorne, Blanche's first husband. The inspector finds reason to question the cause of Thorne's death and the evidence against Barrington. Todd (the mother-and-son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) fails to make the most of a late dramatic development involving the psychologically damaged Rutledge. Still, this long-running series shows no sign of losing steam. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, DeFiore and Co. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An investigation into an 11-year-old murder unearths some surprising revelations in Inspector Ian Rutledge's 21st case (The Gate Keeper, 2018, etc.).Rutledge survived World War I shellshocked and living with the ghostly voice of Hamish, a comrade who died in his arms. When he helps a former soldier find his wife, the grateful man gives him a tip that might help Rutledge find one of the most wanted men in Britain, Alan Barrington, who was accused of murder over a decade earlier and hasn't been seen since. Rutledge's boss gives him the unwelcome job of following up the clue, which begins the inspector's unrelenting search for the truth. Barrington had been accused of engineering a motor crash that killed Blanche Thorne and gravely injured her second husband, Harold Fletcher-Munro. Barrington had been positive that Fletcher-Munro drove Barrington's friend Mark Thorne to financial ruin and suicide so he could marry Blanche. Rutledge starts out by investigating Barrington's friends, including his lawyer and estate agent, both of whom have known him for years. When each refuses to confirm or deny that he's still alive, Rutledge begins to consider the possibility that Mark Thorne did not commit suicide but was murdered by one of the several men who wanted Blanche. Conversations with friends and relatives of the parties involved with Blanche reveal many conflicting opinions. Each snippet Rutledge gleans leads him deeper into a complex maze, but he never considers giving up even when his own wartime demons come to the fore.Although the pace of this intricate tale is necessarily slow, the investigation and its ultimate destination are gripping. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
