Review by Booklist Review
How do you solve a murder when you can't identify the victim? That's the question Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge has to answer when his boss sends him to the small village of Avebury, not far from Stonehenge, in 1921, to take a fresh look at the murder of a young woman found by a mysterious stone. A colleague of Rutledge's got nowhere with his investigation, and now Rutledge may be facing the same result. It doesn't help that the meager (and possibly untrustworthy) clues suggest an unbelievable explanation, prompting Rutledge to wonder if this is the case that will finally stump him. With more than 20 novels in nearly 25 years, this is a series, written by a mother-and-son team under the Charles Todd pseudonym, that shows no signs of slowing down. As always, this one combines crisp plotting with stylish prose. Ideal for historical-mystery devotees.--David Pitt Copyright 2020 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1921, bestseller Todd's middling 22nd whodunit featuring Insp. Ian Rutledge (after 2019's The Black Ascot) opens with a suspenseful tease. Scotland Yard Chief Insp. Brian Leslie is dispatched to Wiltshire, where an unidentified woman, who's been fatally stabbed, has been found inside Avebury, a Stonehenge-like prehistoric stone circle. Leslie is startled to recognize the victim and fears that his reaction has alerted his colleagues that he knew the deceased, even as he reassures himself that, as the officer in charge, he can control the inquiry and its outcome. When Leslie fails to solve the murder, the Avebury case is reassigned to Rutledge, who recently handled a similar crime successfully. Rutledge finds himself in the awkward position of reviewing a superior's work and questioning the man's choices. The answers as to why Leslie felt guilt after seeing the woman's corpse and what she meant to him are less satisfying than the series' many superior solutions. Todd (the mother-and-son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) has done better. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, DeFiore and Co. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
A stranger is found dead near a towering stone figure in Avesbury, a town built within a prehistoric stone circle, and the scant clues regarding her murder have all run cold. Even Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Brian Leslie is stumped. So Chief Inspector Jameson sends along Ian Rutledge--hoping, suspects Rutledge, that he will fail ignominiously--and what he finds calls into question his loyalty to the Yard. With a 100,000-copy first printing.Thrillers
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Inspector Ian Rutledge's 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places.Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can't go to the village of Aveburywhere a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stonesin the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge's nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward to a couple of days off. Instead, Rutledge ends up going to the Shropshire village of Tern Bridge, where a woman eventually identified as Bath schoolmistress Serena Palmer has been stabbed and tossed into a grave dug the day before for someone else. After a witness's unexpectedly keen eye and sharp memory puts Rutledge on a trail that leads with disconcerting suddenness to Serena Palmer's killer, he's sent to Avebury after all, since Leslie's conscientiously thorough inquiries have identified neither the killer nor the victim. This mystery, Rutledge finds, is just as murky as the Shropshire murder was clear, and he despairs that he'll ever have anything to add to Leslie's report. Constantly threatened by Markham, who's still holding the letter of resignation Rutledge submitted to him after his last case (The Black Ascot, 2019, etc.), and intermittently needled by the ghost of Cpl. Hamish McLeod, the corporal he executed in a trench in 1916 when he refused to lead troops into further fighting in the Somme, Rutledge struggles with a case whose every leada necklace of lapis lazuli beads, a trove of letters written to the victimleads him not so much to enlightenment as to ever deepening sadness. The final twist may not surprise eagle-eyed readers, but it will reveal why Todd's generic-sounding title is painfully apt.If you're in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
