A Trio of Outstanding Historical Mysteries by Rennie Airth
by ballybeg
Detective John Madden survived the trenches of World War I and returns to Scotland Yard after the war with dark forces pulling at him. Having lost his young wife and baby daughter in the influenza epidemic, he is broken and alone. But he has a gift for reading the criminal mind and when a serial killer is loose in the villages of Sussex, Madden immerses himself in the pursuit of the crazed killer. River of Darkness is a superb police procedural, with strong, well-realized characters. Not a whodunnit – the identity of the killer is known to the reader early on – the book probes the nature of violence and the effect of war on the human psyche and the culture of England. Along the way, Madden finds another chance for love with the village doctor, Helen. This book is absolutely captivating, and you will be so glad there are more.
The second Madden story, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, is set eleven years later, in 1932, when another killer is targeting young teens in the rural communities of Surrey. Madden, with a new family, has left the force, become a farmer and healed the memories of his tortured past. But his great talent for discerning the complex patterns and motivations of the killer’s activity, and Madden’s proximity to the murdered children, make him indispensible in resolving the case, and his old friend, Chief Inspector Sinclair, draws him into the investigation.
In 1944, the third of the series, Dead of Winter, rounds out the trilogy, this time with a series of seemingly unrelated murders in London, beginning with the Polish ”land girl” who had been working on Madden’s farm. Again, Madden and Sinclair join forces. All three books capture with piercing detail the psychology of serial murder, as well as the life and times of England between the Wars and the very close friendships between Madden and his old comrades in the Yard. Airth has hinted that this might be the last of the series, but he has certainly left the door wide open for another. We can only hope.
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