Alaska Employment Law

Rennie Airth has become somewhat fashionable in the mystery book field, noteworthy for his “pre-forensic” investigation plots that rely mostly on solid detective work and deductive analysis. River of Darkness, set in 1921, gives us Inspector John Madden, a Scotland Yard detective psychologically damaged by his service in the trenches of the World War, assigned here to investigate a brutal multiple murder in the English countryside that initially looks like a robbery gone wrong. Of course, it’s much worse, an oddly targeted killing with a bayonet that has both military and sexual overtones. Airth’s gimmick is to have Madden and the village doctor, Dr. Helen Blackwood (of course, she’s a beautiful, independent, liberated woman in an English village in 1921 – we can see this romance coming from several miles away), seek the advice of a Viennese psychiatrist, who assists the police in developing a profile of the diabolical and clever killer (amusingly for me, I read this book in Vienna).

There is a lot of hand wringing at Scotland Yard about the politics of this case, and what the public should or should not know, which I paid little attention to. And there is lots of melodrama, lots and lots and lots of melodrama. And then the book seems to end, but can’t possibly have ended, so deus leaps out of the machine one more time.

I can’t recommend this. I don’t care for the countryside detective fiction of Elizabeth George, either, but the Inspector Lynley books are way better than this.

Avoid.