a good read

 

okay terrible name. but pretty good mystery. so named for a poem written by the famous poet whose death scotland yard detective ian rutledge is sent to investigate. wow, that was a concise little synopsis. and i explained away the silly name. how do you get jobs writing those blurbs on that backs of books again? (secretly that is my dream job). this book is the second in the series after test of wills. started reading them out of guilt, actually. the mother-son duo who wrote them came to our store for a signing and i was like one of two people to show and it was my job. 'scuse me, one of three, their driver was there too. sounds weird, but they were great. the mother was a little southern lady who was charming as hell AND had on an honest to god fur coat. 

turns out the character is really interesting. he's been diagnosed with shell shock after fighting in WWI in a time when it is socially unacceptable to have such a condition. so he hears voices, or one voice in particular. no one save his ex-fiance, his sisters and the doctors he begged to stay quiet know anything about this, so he's constantly fighting to stay professional and keep his secret. the detective with baggage is not really a new concept, but for rutledge, there is no woman coming to change his life, no one to revenge himself against. he's lonely and broken and none of his colleagues like him. he cannot talk about anything he thinks or feels, especially with other former soldiers, who see shell shock as cowardice. investigating is the only thing that keeps him sane, and not for any sort of macabre pleasure he derives from researching murder, but simply because it is a task that he can begin and see through to the end. it is what he did before the war, and returning to it gives him some sort of normalcy and control, though it tends to isolate him further from other people. for more on this refer to cover art of lone man in trenchcoat, standing in mist on high bluffs.