A CHRISTMAS WITNESS

Newly promoted Chief Inspector Ian Rutledge’s latest case echoes A Christmas Carol in ways that only begin with the season.

Rutledge’s plan to spend the 1921 holiday with his sister’s family are briskly dismissed by a summons from Chief Superintendent Markum, who reports that Lord Braxton, aka Col. Edward Braxton, has been struck down by a mounted horseman who left him for dead. Braxton, who’s demanding at the best of times, wants to keep the details of this event as private as possible, and he’s decided from Rutledge’s wartime service that he’s the ideal choice to investigate and keep under Braxton’s thumb. Traveling to Cottams House, in the Kentish village of Hartsham, Rutledge finds Braxton every bit as imperious and short-tempered as he expected. But although Braxton is such an obvious candidate for murder that he assures Rutledge he’ll never live to see Christmas, his neighbors and household staff seem attached to him; only Henry White, who constantly blames Braxton for military orders that led to the death of White’s only son in France, seems to have a motive to kill him. Readers acquainted with the franchise will appreciate from the beginning that Rutledge’s inquiries here are much more invested in exploring the natural, social, and seasonal qualities of Braxton’s world than in identifying the guilty party; others will have to adjust their expectations in order to accept a climactic revelation that seems more clearly borrowed from Dickens or the Gospels than from any of the evidence Rutledge has uncovered.

A lovingly evoked postwar idyll that could just as well have been titled A Christmas Miracle.