Legacy of the Dead

Rutledge’s superior dispatches him to Durham to question the mother of a missing young woman. The weathered remains found on a windswept Scottish mountainside may be those of Eleanor Gray, but the imperious Lady Maude Gray will have to be handled delicately. This is not the only ground that Rutledge must tread carefully. The case will more than likely lead him on to Scotland, where many of Rutledge’s ghosts rest uneasily.

But he cannot know what else he will encounter as he follows the trail of Eleanor Grey’s last movements. In the village of Duncarrick he will find a young mother who has been destroyed by a malicious campaign of gossip carried by anonymous letters. Now Fiona MacDonald stands accused of murdering the woman on that rugged mountain–and of taking the child of her victim to raise as her own. Rutledge owes this woman a terrible debt, driving him on a harrowing journey to find the truth–leading him back through the fires of his past, and into secrets that still have the power to kill.

LEGACY OF THE DEAD is a breathtaking, riveting mystery set in a fascinating landscape at the wary dawn of a new age. In Scotland, Charles Todd captures a land where war and bloodshed are part of the earth, the walls, and living memory. And where a man like Ian Rutledge is all too much at home.