Charles Todd

"The fighting has ended, the Armistice signed, but the war has left wounds that are still agonizingly raw. Battlefield Nurse Bess Crawford has been assigned to a clinic for amputees, and the Welsh patients worry her. She does her best to help them, but it's clear that they have nothing to go home to, in a valley where only the fit can work in the coal pits. When they are released, she fears that peace will do what war couldn't--take their lives. Their...

"Restless and uncertain of her future in the wake of World War I, former battlefield nurse Bess Crawford agrees to travel to Yorkshire to help a friend of her cousin Melinda through surgery. But circumstances change suddenly when news of a terrible accident reaches them. Bess agrees to go to isolated Scarfdale and the Neville family, where one man has been killed and another gravely injured. The police are asking questions, and Bess is quickly drawn...

An astonishing tip from a grateful ex-convict seems implausible--but Inspector Ian Rutledge is intrigued and brings it to his superior at Scotland Yard. Alan Barrington, who has evaded capture for ten years, is the suspect in an appalling murder during Black Ascot, the famous 1910 royal horserace honoring the late King Edward VII. His disappearance began a manhunt that consumed Britain for a decade. Now it appears that Barrington has returned to England,...

Inspector Ian Rutledge's 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places. Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can't go to the village of Avebury--where a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stones--in the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge's nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward...

Dedicated to helping the many wounded during the Great War, Bess Crawford receives a desperate request from a dying lieutenant while serving as a nurse aboard a hospital ship. "Tell my brother Jonathan that I lied," the young man says. "I did it for Mother's sake. But it has to be set right." Back home in England, Bess receives an unexpected response from the dead soldier's family, for neither Jonathan Graham, his mother, nor his younger brother admit...

When the clues in a hit-and-run investigation lead him to two families famous for producing and selling the world's best Madeira wine, Scotland Yard's Ian Rutledge is pitted against his new supervisor who, dismissing the evidence, has his own suspect.

"A man is murdered at a society wedding held at Ely Cathedral, and the local police are mystified. In the end, they send for Scotland Yard, but not before another man is killed. This time, there's a witness, but her description of the killer is so strange that no one believes her. So it's Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge's task to find out who the murderer is and why he has set out on this killing spree, because there is another death, and the...

In The Red Door, a disturbing puzzle surrounding a lie, a disappearance, and a woman's death ensnares the haunted investigator. Richly atmospheric and unputdownable, The Red Door proves once more that New York Times bestseller Charles Todd belongs in the august company of Ruth Rendell, Anne Perry, Martha Grimes, Ian Ransom, Peter Robinson, P.D. James, and the other contemporary masters of British mystery.

“[Charles] Todd’s mysteries are among the most intelligent and affecting being written these days.”—The Washington Post Book World 
In 1912 Ian Rutledge helped gather the evidence that sent Ben Shaw to the gallows. Now, seven years later, Ben Shaw’s widow brings Rutledge evidence she’s convinced proves her husband’s innocence. Ben Shaw’s past is a tangle of unsettling secrets that...

The weathered remains of Eleanor Gray are found on a Scottish mountainside, and her mother, the domineering Lady Maude Gray, requires delicate treatment. This is a case that will lead Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard to Scotland, where his harrowing journey to find the truth will drag him back through the fires of his past into secrets that still have the power to kill.