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Product Description
In his extraordinary mysteries Charles Todd transcends the boundaries of the form to bring us works built on the basic premise of any good fiction--to show and reflect on the myriad facets of the human condition. 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. The body of a woman, assumed to be their mother, has been found. The local police have a suspect, a mentally unhinged veteran who believes he has glimpsed his wife and children on a railway platform there, even though he'd been told they'd died in an enemy bombing. Face-to-face with a darkness more profound than that in his own mind, and goaded by Hamish, his jeering omnipresent demon, Rutledge goes beyond his authorized mission to find the answer to the questions that torment him. Is the poor devil in the local jail guilty of murder? If not, who is? And still gnawing at him and his superiors is the question: What has become of the children? In his most moving and gripping work yet, Todd has created a tale so engrossing that he is sure to enthrall his devoted readers and send new ones back to the bookstore to find the first two books of the series.
Amazon.com Review
In Search the Dark, the third entry in Charles Todd's remarkable series, the walking-wounded survivors of World War I crowd the English landscape. Scotland Yard's Inspector Rutledge is one of many who suffer from shell shock. He constantly hears--and responds to--the voice of Hamish, a Scottish soldier he shot for cowardice. His latest case does not help his fragile state of mind as it involves another weary and discouraged veteran, Bert Mowbray.
On his way to Lyme Regis to search for work, Bert looks out of the train window in a town called Singleton Magna, and sees an unbelievable sight--his wife and two children who he thought were killed in a London bombing raid. He leaps off the train and tries to find his family, racing desperately across fields and country roads, and finally winding up asleep under a tree. Meanwhile, the battered body of a woman is found on the edge of a cornfield, and Mowbray is arrested. Is the woman his wife? Did he kill her? And what happened to the two children who were with her? Everywhere Rutledge looks, he shows us various forms of damage caused by the war--from the hopes of a local girl whose lover returned with a French wife, to the trauma that Mowbray is going through. As in the first two books, A Test of Wills and Wings of Fire, Todd demonstrates the massive damage done to an entire country by focusing on the small, personal battles of the survivors. --Dick Adler
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