SEARCH THE DARK

It’s the end of WWI and Inspector Ian Rutledge is back at his Scotland Yard job—physically uninjured but plagued by the inner, nagging voice of dead soldier Hamish MacLeod (A Test of Wills, etc.). His first assignment takes him to the village of Singleton Magna in Dorset. There, bull-headed Inspector Hildebrand has in custody shell-shocked veteran Bert Mowbray, accused of killing a woman he’d seen on the train platform with two children, declaring the woman to be his wife. Mowbray’s later search for her seems to have ended in a brutal killing, and now the search is on for the children—and fast becoming a dead end. It soon develops that another person in the area is missing. In nearby Charlburg, Simon Wyatt, expected to follow in his father’s illustrious political footsteps, has returned from the war with French wife Aurore and no ambition except to set up a small museum of Indian and Far Fast artifacts. His onetime near fiancÇe Elizabeth Napier has brought him her London father’s competent assistant to help with the museum. Now that assistant (Margaret Tarlton) has vanished, and Hildebrand refuses to exhume Mowbray’s victim’s body to verify her identity. Strangely enough, a body does surface; this time it’s that of Betty Cooper, a maid who worked for a local farm family but had higher aspirations. Her death provides further unneeded complications—until, with little effort on Ian’s part, all the unlikely answers come to light. A bit livelier than the author’s previous work, with plenty of suspense despite its unfocused plot, unreal people, and too- leisurely style. Best for those who like their mystery melodramas written the old-fashioned way.