On a cold January morning, the United States awakes to discover that an old enemy, one long believed dead and buried, has crawled out of its grave to lay siege to the world's only superpower. With the stunning discovery that enhanced Soviet-made suitcase nukes have been secreted in America's major cities, President Jack Rutledge gathers his National Security Council to weigh the feasibility of a first strike against the Russian Federation.
In Ian Rutledge, Charles Todd has created a classic literary figure. A survivor of World War I, Rutledge is a man walking on the edge of insanity, finding both relief and more madness in his work as a Scotland Yard investigator. Now this series, praised by The New York Times Book Review for “challenging plot, complex characters, and subtle psychological insights (wrapped) in thick layers of atmosphere,” takes Rutledge to the one place that most threatens the balance of his mind: his past.
A LONG SHADOW finds Rutledge turned from hunter to prey when a mysterious stalker forces the Inspector to revisit painful memories from the war and confront unfinished business there. Rutledge first encounters his unknown and unseen adversary after a dinner at the home of mutual friends on New Year’s Eve, 1919. Leaving before the other guests, he finds a brass machine gun cartridge casing on the doorstep. It’s like countless others he’s seen in the trenches—but what is it doing on a quiet London street, far from France? And this one has been engraved. Disturbed and intrigued, he pockets it.
Hampton Regis, a small harbor town on the southern coast of England, is a most unlikely place for violence. Yet, one spring morning, a man is found on the strand so severely beaten that he slips in and out of consciousness. The prime suspect? His wife’s jilted lover, who served with Rutledge in the recently ended Great War—but who left the Front under a cloud. Badly wounded, yes, but did someone also cover up cowardice?
Called out by Scotland Yard into the teeth of a violent blizzard, Inspector Ian Rutledge finds himself confronted with one of the most savage murders he has ever encountered. Rutledge might have expected such unspeakable carnage on the World War I battlefields, where he’d lost much of his soul—and his sanity—but not in an otherwise peaceful farm kitchen in remote Urskdale.
