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44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rutledge rides again, December 26, 2007
Charles Todd, for those who aren't familiar, is a mother and son team of writers who live in the Eastern U.S., and are both of them apparently fervent Anglophiles. They have, for the last decade or so, been collaborating on a series of mysteries chronicling the adventures of Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard. As far as a British mystery series is concerned, these books are very conventional in their structure and setting. Rutledge is almost always somewhere out in the rural British countryside, attempting to discover who killed someone in rather murky surroundings. The similarities to Richard Jury or Adam Dalgliesh are very obvious. There is one significant difference, though, and it's what makes the series stand out: the books are set in the period just after the First World War, and Inspector Rutledge is a veteran of said conflict. Even more unique, he's haunted by the ghost of one of his subordinates, a corporal whom Rutledge had to shoot and kill after the man panicked and tried to run away during a battle. The dead man doesn't blame Rutledge for the incident, not exactly anyway, and serves as a sort of alter ego for Rutledge. You're never entirely certain whether Hamish MacLeod's ghost is really there, or merely a figment of Rutledge's imagination, given that he was horribly scarred psychologically by the war.
In the current episode, Rutledge is first sent to a hamlet of cottages in rural England to find a single man who lives in one of them. The War Office wants the man found for some reason, though they won't tell Scotland Yard why. Rutledge has no luck, really, and is then recalled and sent in a different direction to look into a killing in another rural setting. The two incidents are of course connected, and Rutledge must settle things as further killings occur, and the plot becomes more tangled.
Todd is best with the rural atmosphere of England 80 years ago, and this is one of the better entries in the series. The evocation of the drawing of a horse on a hillside near the cottages is especially spooky. Altogether a good book.
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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not todd's best rutledge mystery, December 31, 2007
The Inspector Rutledge series from Charles Todd are 3-star and 4-star works: none rises to the level of greatness, none descend to 2-star level. They are decent reads. Pale Horse rates 3 stars: decent, but not memorable, worth keeping rather than donating to your local library. There's no groundbreaking here, nothing we haven't seen in the other Rutledge mysteries. There's an unidentified corpse, some less than professional police work (not by Rutledge), time spent in village pubs by Rutledge speaking to local residents.
There are some things which don't feel quite right. Rutledge spends a great deal of time driving back and forth between London, Yorkshire, Berkshire, and Wales, often late at night. Most other series involving Yard inspectors seem to emphasize travel by train. Yorkshire is 200-plus miles from London, and in 1920 there were no motorways. I would think that few petrol stations would be open late at night. Finding your way around at night would not be that easy, and 6-volt headlights (unlike the current 12-volt systems) did not allow a good rate of speed. Motorcar breakdowns were much more common: cars were not designed for sustained long-distance travel. I often found myself thinking about all this driving rather than the mystery at hand.
The story itself seems rather slow at times, and the denouement seems somewhat anticlimactical as well as centering on some improbable coincidences, and there were some large potholes in the story road, so to speak, that were left unfilled-in. If you haven't read Todd's stories, try some of the other works first. For alternative period pieces--mysteries set just after WW I, try also Winspear's books, and in particular, Airth's fine River of Darkness.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Like the pale horse of the Apocalypse, on his back rode Death", April 12, 2008
This slow-paced mystery is set in early twentieth century England. The protagonist is Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard, a man haunted by the ghost of a soldier named Hamish MacLeod, whose voice is his constant companion, conscience and advisor within his head.
The story begins with a group of schoolboys experimenting with alchemy by moonlight in the ruins of an abandoned Abbey. To their horror, they discover that they have apparently raised the devil himself, and swearing each other to secrecy, they run off into the night. The next morning, the body of an unidentified man is discovered in the ruins, dressed in a hooded cloak and gas mask, and next to his foot is a book on alchemy, property of the schoolmaster Albert Crowell.
Thus begins a long investigation into the identity of the dead man, the interrogation of the schoolmaster as a murder suspect, a couple of false trails, and the uncovering of a big cover-up by the British War Office. Along the way, sub-stories relate the circumstances leading to the death of Hamish and also the love life of the Inspector's sister Frances.
The trail takes Rutledge to a group of tiny houses in Berkshire, his job being to observe a man named Gaylord Partridge. The tourist attraction in the area is a huge figure of a horse, cut into the chalk in prehistoric times, and preserved in perpetuity galloping tirelessly along the hillside. Under the pretext of doing some horsing around on the cliffs, Rutledge learns that Partridge has disappeared, as he has been known to do on occasion, and that the occupants of the cottages all have secrets they'd rather keep hidden.
Amidst conflicts with the War Office, his own office politics and local law enforcement, Rutledge painstakingly pecks away at the armor of the residents of the Tomlin Cottages, and things start heating up both literally and figuratively when arson and murder go hand in hand.
A solid read, except for a few questionable plot contrivances, and packed with local color, this story starts off on a high note, and hastens to increase the pace as it wraps up at the end, but dallies too long in the middle for short attention spans.
Amanda Richards, April 13, 2008
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