I’ve been working on Thursday’s Treasures in My Closet post, quite a lengthy one, so today I’m using one of Sandie Herron’s blog posts. She reviewed Charles Todd’s A Fearsome Doubt. Thank you, Sandie.

A FEARSOME DOUBT
By Charles Todd
Series:  Inspector Ian Rutledge, Book 6
Bantam (October 1, 2002)

I’ve never read another author’s books that quite so authentically captures the ambiance of an era in time.  While reading, I was literally transported into the story of Ian Rutledge, both the man and the inspector at Scotland Yard.   In this sixth adventure, Rutledge is still haunted by Hamish MacLeod, the man Rutledge was forced to execute during the Great War and who now lives on in his shell-shocked mind.  As much as Rutledge dreads his constant presence, their conversations with each other help Rutledge in his life.

Ben Shaw was hanged for murder in London, 1912.  The inspector on the case built against him was Ian Rutledge.  In 1919 Mrs. Shaw visits Rutledge with what she thinks will prove her husband innocent – a mourning locket supposedly stolen by Shaw but now in the possession of someone else.  Rutledge finds it difficult to re-open the case of a dead man; after all, it will not change the end result.  In addition, his superior found himself promoted after this case was solved.  He will not take kindly to seeing that outcome altered. 

Before Rutledge can do much more than review his old notes, he is called away to Kent to investigate several murders of ex-soldiers who had returned from war missing a limb.  Rutledge must insinuate himself into the life of this town and the people who live there to try and piece together clues from the murders. He is consumed by performing his job as inspector; he has very little personal life.  Although he feels he let his soldiers down, he always felt that he had succeeded in doing his job well.  When Mrs. Shaw shakes that core belief, he is driven beyond human endurance to answer her question and solve these murders.

This book is as much about the mysteries presented as it is about the characters and how they interact with each other and with Rutledge.  It is within the characters themselves that the answers lay.  Troubled by a heavy burden of guilt and grief and loss, Rutledge does not see the solutions until he does his own soul searching.  Solving these crimes becomes more about what is left unsaid than what is said.

Even more than in his previous books, Todd shares how tremendous the burden of war is on those who served in it.  Rutledge shares this early in the book:  “Nor did he need a Cenotaph … as a focus for his grief and loss.  He – like countless others – carried them with him every day.  The men he had served with, shared hardship and fears with, bled and suffered with, were as sharp in his memory and his nightmares as they had been before they died.  As was the recurring voice that lived in his mind.  A reminder in every waking moment of the Scots he’d led and the one Scot he’d been forced to execute during the horrendous bloodbath that had been the Battle of the Somme.”  We would call it post traumatic stress disorder today; in Rutledge’s time, they called it shell shock.  Every soldier went home with some degree of it, and every family they returned to had to deal with it as well, even those where no soldier returned.

I am fascinated to watch how Ian Rutledge survives of the tragedy of war.  His struggle is that of every veteran yet is made even more realistic as he strives to keep on living while he recovers.  I hope that Charles Todd keeps exploring these issues while writing his superb procedurals.