Capital crimes

Rennie Airth’s first John Madden mystery, River of Darkness, published ten years ago, was set in 1921. His second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was set in 1932 and this, the third and reputedly the last, takes place in the closing months of 1944. The series spans, therefore, more than 20 years. In the first, Inspector Madden of Scotland Yard solves some gruesome country-house murders. He is a man still much troubled by his experience in the trenches, but during the case he meets and falls in love with Dr Helen Blackwell, who becomes his wife.

By the time of the second book he has retired from the police, and has a farm in Surrey where he lives contentedly with Helen and their two children. So in this latest book years have passed since he was an operational detective — an unusual state of affairs for the main character of a crime series. However, as loyal readers will know, retired though John Madden may be, he has a habit of finding crime, and major crime at that, on his doorstep, and so it proves to be.

A Polish girl, Rosa Nowak, who had been working on his farm as a land girl, is garrotted in Bloomsbury while on a visit to her aunt in London. It is November 1944 and the blackout is very much in place. Round Rosa’s body, even embedded in her hair, are struck matches; the murderer had been attempting to see something on or about his victim. A French prostitute based in Soho is murdered next — the clean brutal garrotte again — and then a group of small-time crooks is massacred in a pub in Wapping during an attack by a V-1 buzz bomb.

Assistant Commissioner Sir Wilfred Bennett, Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair, his retirement deferred because of the war, Billy Styles — all familiar from the earlier books, as is Ransom, the pathologist — are by turns quick and slow in piecing together the clues.