A Pale Horse (Inspector Ian Rutledge Series #10) » (~)

Charles Todd is the author of nine Ian Rutledge mysteries—A Pale Horse, A False Mirror, A Long Shadow, A Cold Treachery, A Fearsome Doubt, Watchers of Time, Legacy of the Dead, Search the Dark, Wings of Fire, and A Test of Wills—and one stand-alone novel. They are a mother-and-son writing team and live in Delaware and North Carolina, respectively.

The Great War never relinquished its hold on Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, leaving him haunted and isolated, unable to forget. In the spring of 1920, he's dispatched to Berkshire to find a missing man whose war work is so secret even Rutledge cannot know its true nature. Meanwhile, miles away, an unidentified body has been discovered in the ruins of a Yorkshire abbey, clothed in a monk's robe and wearing a gas mask.

In the shadow of a great white horse cut into the chalk hillside where cottages once built to house the sick and untouchable now shelter outcasts like himself Rutledge must extract a terrible truth from those who hide from the past. For death is never quite finished with anyone, least of all the men who fought in the bloody trenches of France.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

"Ian Rutledge, the Scotland Yard man in Charles Todd's outstanding series of historical mysteries, has a wonderful capacity for compassion - a quality this shell-shocked (and guilt-ridden) World War I veteran acquired over four hellish years in the battlefields of France. That heightened sensibility comes into play in A Pale Horse, when the War Office orders Rutledge to locate an eccentric scientist who has disappeared from his secluded cottage in Berkshire."