A DAY OF JUDGMENT

His 1921 promotion doesn’t protect Chief Inspector Ian Rutledge from getting sent to remote Northumberland to investigate a death that doesn’t look all that suspicious.

Even after the local coroner has established that boat pilot and chart maker Oswin Dunn was killed by a blunt instrument somewhere far from the beach on Ross Sands where his body washed up, Rutledge realizes that his job isn’t to work out whodunit but to keep the local churches from any hint of scandal. With the failure of Plan A (assure the world that the aging Dunn died a natural death), he’s forced to fall back on Plan B (craft a story about his death that assures the world that his corpse did not float down from the nearby Holy Island). Goaded by both his superior, Chief Supt. Markum, and his familiar, Hamish MacLeod, the soldier he ordered executed for refusing to continue fighting the Great War, Rutledge shuttles between the bare-bones Ship Inn, where he’s staying, and the posh Bamburgh Castle Inn, where there’s a telephone. The discovery that Dunn’s sister, Ilsa, had married traveling German salesman Herman Krüger, before she left the village supplies a motive for Dunn’s murder—hatred of the Hun—that would seem only one of several possible motives if Todd hadn’t gone out of his way to announce it in his prologue. The only question remaining is why Dunn’s disposition and behavior were changed so dramatically by the sinking of HMS Ascot by a German U-boat the day before the 1918 Armistice. And that’s one Rutledge, after examining the evidence, can answer with an authority that would bring satisfaction to anyone but his own tormented soul.

A welcome final revelation suggests that happiness may yet await the troubled hero.