The Red Door

Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent to rural England to investigate the death of a woman whose body was discovered in a house with a red-painted door, a symbol that sets off a chain of questions about a wartime lie and the family it destroyed. Charles Todd's twelfth Rutledge novel moves between the trenches of Rutledge's memory and the complicated English countryside he now navigates as a Scotland Yard detective, always accompanied by Hamish, the voice of the Scottish soldier he was forced to execute and who has lived inside his head ever since.

Simon Prebble is the consummate interpreter of this series, his voice carrying the period atmosphere and emotional weight with equal authority. His rendering of Hamish, a recurring internal presence in the novels, is a particular achievement: distinct enough to register as a separate consciousness without ever breaking the novel's psychological realism. At just over ten hours, The Red Door moves with the unhurried confidence of a well-crafted mystery.