When successful London businessman is found savagely and bizarrely murdered in a medieval tithe barn on his estate in Somerset, Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge is called upon to investigate and soon discovers that the victim was universally despised.

In the ruins of Yorkshire's Fountains Abbey lies the body of a man wrapped in a cloak, the face covered by a gas mask. Next to him is a book on alchemy, which belongs to the schoolmaster, a conscientious objector in the Great War. Who is this man, and is the investigation into his death being manipulated by a thirst for revenge? Meanwhile, the British War Office is searching for a missing man of their own, someone whose war work was so secret that...

"Scotland Yard's Ian Rutledge is faced with his most perplexing case yet: a murder with no body, and a killer who can only be a ghost"-- Spring, 1921. Scotland Yard sends Inspector Ian Rutledge to the sea-battered village of Walmer on the coast of Essex, where amongst the salt flats and a military airfield lies Benton Abbey, a grand manor with a storied past. The lady of the house may prove his most bewildering witness yet. She claims she saw a violent...

When the clues in a hit-and-run investigation lead him to two families famous for producing and selling the world's best Madeira wine, Scotland Yard's Ian Rutledge is pitted against his new supervisor, who has his own suspect.

In post-World War I England, Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge faces a wall of silence as he attempts to bring a ruthless killer to justice for the bludgeoning death of a Lancashire woman and the murder of a man who never came home from the Great War.

New Year's Eve, 1919. Scotland Yard's Inspector Ian Rutledge has accompanied his sister to the home of mutual friends for dinner but is called away by work. On the steps outside, he finds a brass cartridge casing that is seemingly identical to the countless others he'd seen during the war he still cannot forget. But this one has an engraving in the metal. Curious, he pockets it. Soon he finds another -- in a most unexpected place. These cartridge...

"Hours after his sister's wedding, a restless Ian Rutledge drives aimlessly, haunted by the past, and narrowly misses a motorcar stopped in the middle of a desolate road. Standing beside the vehicle is a woman with blood on her hands and a dead man at her feet. She swears she didn't kill Stephen Wentworth. A stranger stepped out in front of their motorcar, and without warning, fired a single shot before vanishing into the night. But there is no trace...

"A man is murdered at a society wedding held at Ely Cathedral, and the local police are mystified. In the end, they send for Scotland Yard, but not before another man is killed. This time, there's a witness, but her description of the killer is so strange that no one believes her. So it's Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge's task to find out who the murderer is and why he has set out on this killing spree, because there is another death, and the...

"On the eve of the bloody Battle of the Somme, a group of English officers having a last drink before returning to the Front make a promise to each other: if they survive the battle ahead--and make it through the war--they will meet in Paris a year after the fighting ends. They will celebrate their good fortune by racing motorcars they beg, borrow, or own from Paris to Nice. In November 1919, the officers all meet as planned, and though their motorcars...

Troubled Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge wrestles with a startling and dangerous case that reaches far into the past when a false confession from a man who is not who he claims to be leads to a brutal murder.