Wings of Fire

Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent to Cornwall to investigate three sudden deaths in a prominent family, and discovers among the dead a reclusive spinster who turns out to have been the anonymous war poet O.A. Manning, whose verses helped Rutledge survive the trenches of France. The discovery transforms an investigation into a reckoning with his own past, as the voice of Hamish, the soldier he executed under orders, guides him toward a truth rooted in family madness and old violence. Charles Todd's second Rutledge novel earned the Dilys Award and deepened the series' portrait of a traumatized man using work as the only form of self-preservation available to him.

Samuel Gillies continues to give the Rutledge series its measured, atmospheric quality, capturing both the Cornish landscape and the interior landscape of a detective living alongside the dead. His handling of Hamish's voice as an integrated part of Rutledge's psychology rather than a supernatural intrusion is particularly skillful. At just over eleven hours, this early series entry is one of its most beautifully constructed.