The new Ian Rutledge

The titles of Charles Todd novels usually strike me as bland and easily forgotten. I can never remember which of these books I have read and which I haven't. These qualities may also be true of A Divided Loyalty, the latest Inspector Ian Rutledge novel, yet still I find it a solid title for it describes not just the inspector's dilemma, but also that of his chief suspect and even that of his superior back at the Scotland Yard. Nobody, it seems, knows exactly which side he should be on.

Rutledge is assigned to investigate the murder of an unidentified woman in rural England, while another man from the Yard, Chief Inspector Brian Leslie, is assigned a similar case in another rural province. Rutledge quickly gets his man, but when Leslie comes up empty, Rutledge is dispatched to see if he can do better.

Evidence is scant and the dead woman proves difficult to identify, but Rutledge is shaken when he discovers that what little he knows points to Leslie himself as the killer. Rutledge's job is already in jeopardy with a boss who wants to get rid of him because of the lingering effects of shellshock from the Great War (this is 1921), so how does he convince Chief Superintendent Markham that one of his own officers may be a murderer?

This may be one of the best of the Rutledge novels, and there are now more than a score of them. Suspense builds at a steady pace, and just when the reader begins to relax, it builds some more.