by Charles Todd
Part of Inspector Ian Rutledge, book 24
First published 2022
Spring 1921 finds Inspector Ian Rutledge dispatched to Walmer, a windswept Essex village where salt flats meet military airfields. At Benton Abbey, a stately manor shadowed by wartime grief, Lady Benton delivers an impossible account. She witnessed a brutal killing, she insists, committed by Captain Nelson. Two problems confound Rutledge: no corpse exists, and Nelson died in the war. The village dismisses Lady Benton as a woman broken by loss, her mind fractured by widowhood and mourning. Yet Rutledge finds her lucid and composed, her testimony disturbingly precise. As he probes deeper into Nelson's wartime fate, suspicious deaths emerge from the Abbey's history. The airfield harbors its own buried secrets. Rutledge's investigation awakens something deadly, and fresh murders begin to follow his inquiries through this desolate coastal community.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime, thriller, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful
Tropes: amateur-sleuth, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Walmer, Essex, Benton Abbey
Period: 1921, Spring
336 pages · Hardcover · William Morrow
Content warnings: death, violence