2010 January

1 - H V MORTON'S LONDON

- being The Heart of London, The Spell of London and The Nights of London in one volume .

Originally written as newspaper articles between the wars you are offered a view into a time and place now very different. You can read these and then try and find how places have stayed the same or changed in the present day
and you can read them as a social commentary of the times. Today they would not read as politically correct and that makes them interesting as well.

2 - A PALE HORSE: CHARLES TODD

The exemplary 10th Inspector Ian Rutledge historical whodunit (after A False Mirror) offers tight plotting and rich characterization amid understated but convincing evocations of post–WWI England. Haunted by memories of battle, unable to find a safe haven after his discharge from a psychiatric hospital and the abrupt departure of his fiancée, shell-shocked veteran Rutledge has returned to his prewar life as a Scotland Yard inspector. This time out, the War Office wants him to locate a mysterious person of interest, connected with (and perhaps the same as) an unidentified corpse found at a Yorkshire abbey. Rutledge toils diligently to uncover personal secrets and shames that may have motivated someone to kill, and their connection to a long-ago romance between the suspected killer's wife and the local inspector investigating the case. The mother and son writing as Charles Todd show no evidence of running out of ideas for murder mysteries that illuminate new aspects of their compelling protagonist and the horrors of the Great War.

3: A MATTER OF JUSTICE: CHARLES TODD

At the start of a new century, in a war far away from England, two British soldiers see a golden opportunity . . . and do the unthinkable to take advantage of it.

Twenty years later, a successful though much despised London businessman is found savagely and bizarrely murdered in a medieval tithe barn on his estate in Somerset. For Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge, a man still shaken by the Great War's deafening echoes, the well-concealed trail he must now follow is leading back to an event so monumentally barbarous that its consequences envelop even the innocent. And when justice takes a malevolent turn, one haunted policeman must stand alone against the onrushing tide.