River Of Darkness

River of Darkness is the 1999 debut Rennie Airth had waited his entire career to write, and it shows. Set in 1921 England, the novel introduces John Madden, a Scotland Yard inspector still carrying the shrapnel of the Western Front, sent to investigate a country-house massacre in Surrey that the local police want to call a botched burglary and that Madden sees almost immediately as something else.

Airth is doing several things at once. The book is a procedural, tracking the investigation with the kind of slow methodical care that the form requires. It is also a portrait of postwar England that has aged better than most of its contemporaries: the silence about what the men have brought home, the country-house economies in collapse, the women in unfamiliar jobs they intend to keep. And it is a serial-killer novel that takes its monster's craft from his time in the trenches, which Airth handles with restraint.

Madden is the achievement. He is quietly brilliant, undemonstratively damaged, and slowly allowed to fall in love with a country doctor named Helen Blackwell in a way that the book earns. The villain chapters are written from inside his head with the kind of attention that the form often refuses.

Five stars. A first-rate debut and the start of one of the strongest historical-mystery sequences of the 2000s. Read this, then The Blood-Dimmed Tide, and accept that the others will follow.