Date: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00
Description: The New York Times–bestselling author discusses the creation of their beloved English police inspector and his long-running mystery series. Scotland Yard's Insp. Ian Rutledge made his debut in 1996 with Charles Todd's historical police procedural A Test of Wills. Many years and cases later, the shell-shocked World War I veteran has won over readers far and wide. But how did such a troubled yet wise character come to be? Writing together as Charles Todd, the mother-son duo of Caroline and Charles Todd, share insights on creating their sleuth and the New York Times–bestselling series. In this es
Publisher: Mysteriouspress.Com/Open Road

Ian Rutledge

A Mysterious Profile

Charles Todd

Ian Rutledge

It’s hard to say where Ian Rutledge came from. He sprang, rather like Minerva from Zeus’s brow, fully grown. Only in this instance, Zeus had two
heads: Caroline and Charles working together.

It has been a winding road toward this collaboration.

The beginning was probably as simple as both of us growing up in a family of storytellers. When you sit on a porch on a warm summer’s evening, listening to your elders talking about the past, watching fireflies light the night, mesmerized by the soft creak of a rocking chair, it’s easy to fall under the spell of a world you’ve never seen except in your imagination.

That imagination was most certainly fed by reading—we were also a family of voracious readers, books everywhere in the house, something about nearly everything from the American Civil War to a study of zebras in East Africa. It’s our opinion that favorite authors tend to shape one’s taste in books. Favorite stories stick in the mind because they offer something that captures the fancy and thus become a part of our literary memory. It follows that when you sit down and decide to write your own novel, there are already certain standards in place, affecting decisions that you will make both consciously and unconsciously. You are familiar with the framework of a good story. You know how strong characters seem to take on a life of their own. You’ve developed a sense of how a setting adds to the story, and a feeling for the importance of pace.

And finally the two of us share a family enthusiasm for history. There are several periods in which we each have a special interest, and others where we share a background. Nevertheless, we’d argue into the night about what might have been, what ought to have been, and what actually happened when the layers of viewpoints have been peeled away from the truth. If you are a student of history, you must also be a student of war. War is what happens when diplomacy fails, and the odd thing is that war always brings out the worst—and sometimes the best—in human nature. As the knights of the round table learned to their sorrow.

Now fast forward to one summer’s day in 1992 when we had paid a visit to the King’s Mountain Revolutionary War battlefield. We discussed tactics and how the outcome might have been changed by this or that event. We were still talking about it in the car driving back to Charlotte, N.C., where Charles happened to be living at the time. And at a lull in the conversation, Caroline commented, “You know, we ought to write a book together. A novel. A mystery.” She was never sure afterward where this sudden thought came from, although we’d just been delving into how the writer Inglis Fletcher had dealt with the battle in her Carolina Series, where it had become a dramatic centerpiece. So blame Inglis Fletcher, if you like.

Caroline had actually met her at one of Mrs. Fletcher’s book signings years before and had been impressed by a remark indicating that Mrs. Fletcher knew what had become of her characters after a book ended. This was intriguing and, as Caroline read after that, she could see what Mrs. Fletcher meant. Authors who knew their characters as people generally wrote more exciting books. And action novels seemed to be better written when the author pictured that action like a film unrolling, rather than directing it on a stage set.

At any rate, Caroline made the suggestion to Charles, and Charles laughed. Married and busy with his own life, the last thing he had time for was writing. But what he hadn’t reckoned with was traveling in his work, and as that travel increased, long nights in hotel rooms also increased in number. Finally boredom sent him to the telephone and he asked Caroline if she’d been serious when she made her suggestion.

Any port in a storm …

By that time, Caroline had almost forgotten even asking the question. But she said yes, what did you have in mind?

Charles answered, “You brought it up, I didn’t.”

There ensued a long period of discussion about what might interest both of us.

Mysteries were popular and selling well. But what kind of mystery? We were both tired of the burnt out Italian/ Irish/whatever cop, drinking too much, overweight, divorced, and about to retire when the case he can’t let go comes along. So psychological suspense seemed to be our best choice. And we couldn’t think of a city both of us really wanted to write about long term—or that someone else wasn’t already using very well.

We wanted something different, something that was interesting enough to keep us guessing and excited. London, Charles said. We’d both been there, we liked the city, we liked the English folks we’d come to know over the years, and it was an excuse to travel. That bug had bitten the entire family at one time or another, and the idea of going back to England to do research appealed. Oddly enough, in the end, we chose not to put Rutledge in London as his patch, seeing far more creative potential in the wide range of villages where class distinctions were blurred and old grudges offered more interesting motives. Even Holmes enjoyed moving out of London.

But—forensic science was taking over police work. Did we really want to spend our time digging into cadavers or swabbing up vomit or looking for threads of carpet in the body hairs of victims? Not really. Mafia, drug runners, terrorists, serial killers—ditto. They weren’t challenging subjects because their motivations are predictable.

The solution regarding forensics was simple: go with an earlier period—one modern enough to be familiar, but still a time frame when forensics was in its infancy. And what was the most traumatic event at that time? World War I.

The next challenge was to consider why ordinary, civilized people sometimes kill. If killing is instinctive, why do we spend millions of dollars training ordinary civilized men to march into battle and shoot the other side? But people do kill without warning, sometimes once, sometimes multiple times. The question then becomes: What is there in a person’s life that makes him or her decide to murder someone? What is the critical factor? And if there is one, how would a policeman solve such a murder? What would he look for? What would make him arrest this person when there were five others with what sounded like equally solid reasons for taking a life?

Ah!

Now we needed a detective—in this case, an English police inspector. But not someone living in a small town where he knows everyone and everyone knows him. In the long run you wind up killing off the neighbors. Much more interesting, as Charles had discovered in his own troubleshooting, to be the hired gun, the stranger come to shake up the town. Therefore our man must work for Scotland Yard, where he can move about. There’s also the fact that unlike Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles, England doesn’t see that many murders in a year’s time. We rather liked the idea that there was nothing commonplace about murder there—that it was still shocking and people tended to withdraw from it rather than rush to gawk at it.

And of course our man at the Yard must have marched off to war. Every ablebodied British male fought in WWI—it was expected that he’d be a veteran like Wimsey and Captain Hastings. Even Hercule Poirot was a Belgian refugee from the war. This proved to be a dilemma. Four years in the trenches and not even a scratch? Unlikely. But if this policeman lost a limb or an eye or was gassed, he wouldn’t be able to return to Scotland Yard when the fighting ended. We set that aside, deliberating.

Now for a name. Something strong, but individual. And as a salute to Inglis Fletcher and one of her favorite characters, we chose Rutledge. With a name like that, his first name should be short, and Caroline remembered another book she’d loved when she was young, where a man named Ian had been memorable. Thus was Inspector Ian Rutledge christened.

So far so good.

Hamish wasn’t our idea. He came with Rutledge, just as he does in the novels.

Every man—or woman, these days—who has seen combat has memories he’d just as soon forget. And Rutledge was surely no different. All right, what about an invisible wound? Something there, damaging, something that couldn’t be spoken of? There was shell shock, of course—what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1919—indeed even in World War II—this sort of thing was considered cowardice. Men who could manage to keep it hidden, did so, sometimes at a price that was almost higher than they could pay. More than a few wound up taking their service revolvers out to the back garden and putting a bullet in their heads.

We’d both known veterans who suffered from PTSD and, in Rutledge’s case, it seemed to be a logical outcome of a war that had quickly become a slaughterhouse for four unimaginable years, a stalemate in which generals had developed no better strategy than throwing men against an entrenched line over and over again until—they hoped—the enemy would falter. Consequently, gains were measured in mere yards.

Rutledge isn’t a perfect man and was never intended to be. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly, he has a temper, and he knows what guilt is. How it feels, how it fills the brain and invades dreams. He’s tenacious and insightful as well, and he understands human nature better than most. He’s also university-educated at a time when most of the British police force came up through the ranks from a very different class. The new face of Scotland Yard.

He’s a romantic figure, too, in a sense—not in terms of Romance novels, but in the older tradition of the Greek heroes—men who were vulnerable even when they were demi-gods. Epics and legends and the long tradition of story-telling drew on characters who have a fault and whose tragedy is compelling. Hamlet is of that mold, and some of Jack Higgins’ men, and Shane, and the old legends of Arthur and Lancelot—men for whom there was a destiny. The anti-hero has his place but, over the centuries, it’s a man who stands alone and struggles with life and death who makes the most interesting reading.

The only problem was how to use this in a modern setting, where there are no dragons to slay and no damsels in distress, only dead bodies left behind by murderers. The solution came very naturally through Rutledge’s father, a barrister. Years before, Rutledge asked his father: Who spoke for the dead? He was told: No one. The law is concerned with punishing the killer so that he’s an example to other would-be lawbreakers, a warning that this will happen to you if you transgress the rules of a civilized society. The dead are simply evidence of wrong-doing.

And so Rutledge, instead of following his father in the law, chose to become a policeman, only just beginning to be seen as a respectable profession. A generation earlier, Inspector Pitt was expected to knock on the door at the servants’ entrance. Times were a-changing, but there was still a certain dislike of the sort of people a policeman must be involved with. If Rutledge began his career with the altruistic intent of speaking for the dead, he soon found that this way of looking at murder actually gave him a practical insight into why someone was killed.

Add to that the intuition of experience, which Rutledge believes he’s lost after four years in France. He fights to recover that in the first novel, A Test of Wills.

The Rutledge novels don’t have a large ensemble cast. There’s his sister Frances, single and busy with her own life, though possessed of an ability to read her brother’s moods even when she doesn’t understand what lies behind them. His god-father, the retired architect, David Trevor, plays a larger role in Legacy of the Dead, and he’ll return soon. There are the occasional friends from Rutledge’s university days or war years. Melinda Crawford appears from time to time—especially in A Fearsome Doubt. She’s actually of his parents’ generation. She’s had an interesting past of her own, and Rutledge is fond of her. Having known him as a child, she returns that fondness with a tart tongue that hides her deep caring.

Of course Chief Superintendent Bowles is always there, wishing Rutledge at the devil, because he feels threatened by the younger, more able man. Sergeant Gibson, who knows most of what’s happening in the Yard and who has been there long enough to become a fixture, is sometimes an ally and sometimes not. Since A Cold Treachery, Inspector Mickelson, protected by Bowles, is ambitious and often treading on Rutledge’s heels.

One other character has reappeared, much to our surprise, over many of the books. Olivia Marlowe, who wrote several volumes of war poetry as O. A. Manning, first appears in the second Rutledge novel, Wings of Fire. Our intention was to let her poems form the basis for Rutledge’s solution to the question of her guilt in a series of murders within the Marlowe family. Halfway through, we realized that readers must also read the poems for themselves. Oops. So we sat down and created her body of verse. O. A. Manning’s work continues to crop up unexpectedly—Rutledge has a tendency to quote her. We think he must have been half in love with her, though he never met her. Something about her, her poems (which he’d read in the trenches), touched him in a way that few women have—so far.

There’s someone we never meet who has a strong influence on Rutledge’s past—his former fiancée Jean, who was appalled at the scarecrow of a man who came back from France at the end of the war, broken in spirit. She ended their engagement and walked away. It’s some time before Rutledge can come to terms with this betrayal. Rutledge spent weeks in a clinic for shell shocked men before his sister discovered a doctor who could help him rather than condemn him to madness. But Dr. Fleming also demands something in return—he forces Rutledge to face Hamish. Searching for stability, Rutledge returns to the Yard, praying his skills have survived, but there’s the very real possibility that Hamish will be the stronger force in his mind. A Test of Wills is just that, Rutledge facing the challenge that Hamish presents. There is always the alternative of using his service revolver to end the struggle for both of them, but Rutledge is determined to fight for his sanity, and at the end of the novel learns whether he has won or lost his battle.

One other character of interest appeared first in A Long Shadow and returns in A Pale Horse. Meredith Channing is the widow of a soldier lost in France at about the same time Rutledge was forced to shoot Hamish. She was intended to have one small scene, but she didn’t take her cue and walk off stage left. But just what is her role? What connects her to Rutledge? At the end of A Matter of Justice, he turns to her in a moment of despair, and trusts her as he trusts few others.

Each book takes place a month or so after the last. June, 1919, for A Test of Wills, July for Wings of Fire, August for Search the Dark, and so on. Search the Dark finds him faced with a killer he doesn’t want to arrest. And that was an interesting game to consider, plotting it. The killer has very sound reasons for murder, and the victims aren’t sympathetic. They have played a decisive role in their own deaths, proving that not all victims are to be pitied in the same way.

Legacy of the Dead was an opportunity to delve more into Hamish MacLeod’s life before the war, and without warning brings Rutledge face to face with the woman Hamish would have married if he’d survived. We often use Hamish in Rutledge short stories, setting them before the Battle of the Somme while the young Scots corporal is still alive. That’s given us a very interesting insight into the man who now lives only in Rutledge’s damaged mind.

Perhaps at this stage we ought to say something about the writing process. When we began the collaboration, we had no idea how to go about it and so we wrote our own rules. Other authors had used the alternate chapter system—Emma Lathen, for instance—where one took the lead character and his story while the other carried on with the secondary story that would mesh in the end with the main plot. But we had no primary/secondary story to parcel out.

We were also hampered by the fact that we are not genetically programmed to outline. Caroline couldn’t do it in high school and she saw no reason to begin now. Charles had inherited this trait. We both had solved the outline problem in school by simply writing whatever it was and then outlining the results. The system had succeeded, we’d managed to fool teachers and professors alike (though it had meant not procrastinating—we always had whatever it was written ahead of everyone else), and we tried it here as well.

But that means if one has no idea where the story is heading or what is happening, or who walks on and off the empty stage, another method has to be worked out. English 101 usually had topics: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” A mystery novel has a murder. Everyone claimed that the body had to be found in the first so many pages.

It turned out to be unsatisfactory to plant a corpse in the first few pages.

We quickly discovered that the mood of the story was more important than when the body showed up.

And so we metaphorically sat down, each in our own space, and considered what this particular novel needed to launch it.

It worked.

The first few pages of A Test of Wills set out several important points that gave us a clue as to what happened next. It also set the mood and gave the reader an insight into how Colonel Harris died and his state of mind as he saw death coming.

How did we arrive at these first few pages? By brainstorming, discussing what we wanted to establish for ourselves and for the readers, creating the wording that would give a sense of what was about to happen. Consensus developed from that, each of us offering ideas and even sentences or paragraphs, paring these into a whole, then reworking until there was a smooth and intriguing flow to entice the reader into our concept.

For instance, in Wings of Fire, a housemaid walks to work one morning, an ordinary beginning to her day despite the sea mists, and opens the kitchen door as she has a hundred other mornings. But then she notices that some things aren’t the same, that the ordinary is missing. Dishes aren’t in the sink, drapes haven’t been opened, voices aren’t echoing through the house. She comes to the stairs and calls to the master of the house, then to the mistress, but no one answers. She looks into several rooms and finds them empty. And when she comes to the final door, and reaches her hand out to touch the knob, she knows that something terrible must be on the other side. And she can’t face it. She turns instead to go for help.

We, the authors, now needed to understand what lay on the other side of that door and what it represented in the story line. And this is what we will build on, scene by scene, chapter by chapter.

A Long Shadow opens on New Year’s Eve as Rutledge and his sister Frances arrive at a friend’s house for dinner. Their hostess, Maryanne Browning, has invited as a special guest one Meredith Channing, to conduct a “séance” for the evening’s amusement. She makes Rutledge uneasy from the start—she seems to know him, although he doesn’t recall ever meeting her. And by the time the séance is to begin, he’s sure she will see Hamish in his mind and reveal his secret to the others. It’s almost a relief when the telephone rings—the Yard calling to verify information—and Rutledge seizes the opportunity to excuse himself and leave. But as he steps out the front door into the cold evening, a cartridge shell from the war years rolls away from his foot and bounces into the gutter. Already tense, he’s not prepared for what appears to be a warning of some sort, the first of several more to come. That gave us the second focus of the story that began in an empty village, for even as he stalks a killer, he himself is being stalked by some- one with a deadly purpose. How will Rutledge handle finding himself in danger again? That was interesting to explore.

A Pale Horse opens with a man standing in the darkness looking up at the chalk cut figure of the Uffington White Horse. He’s unable to sleep, and he’s drawn again and again to come and stare at the horse, because in some way it reminds him of the horses gassed along with soldiers on the battlefield. It’s a vision he can’t put aside, even though he was never in the trenches, never gassed. Our next question has to be, who is this man, and why does the White Horse represent horror to him? And why when the young smith walks by, oblivious, on his way to a Stone Age tomb called Wayland Smithy, does the man in the shadows think that he himself ought to walk to the tomb, crawl in, and let himself die there. That he and the world would be better off if he did.

Now the question becomes, who is he? And why is he haunted by something he’s never been a part of? And what happens to him?

There’s also a broader concept at work in the overall plot—in this case we were curious about what happens when a body is unidentified and others see a chance to make it serve their own ends. That led us from Uffington, which was then in Berkshire, to Yorkshire and Wales, before Rutledge had untangled the truth from the fabric of lies that were told him by a good many people who were intent on their own agenda.

In A False Mirror, the overall concept was what happens when Rutledge must defend a man he despises, someone who let the side down in the trenches and who now calls on Rutledge to help him clear his name in a case of murder and hostage taking.

We often find that the characters have aims of their own, and we are often as surprised by them as the reader must be. In A Matter of Justice, there are several characters who are driven by emotions that are so strong they will stop at nothing, will be bound by no laws but their own. We hadn’t intended that to happen, at least not in the beginning. Yet as we worked with and got to know these people, we could see clearly that injustice isn’t the flip side of justice, but something that can drive people to settle scores at any price. It turned out to be a very challenging task to capture their determination.

Characters are fascinating when they act on their own behalf. We never know who the killer may be, because we don’t know what the clues are and how they will affect the other characters and the case—until one fact, one clue, points in the direction of the murderer so forcefully that there is no doubt about that person’s guilt. We work it out step by step with Rutledge himself. We see what he sees, we don’t act as an omniscient being pulling the puppet’s strings.

Do we ever disagree or argue? Oh, yes! Into the wee hours of the night, sometimes. But we usually come to an amicable agreement or look for a variation on whatever theme is causing the problem. Sometimes the problem is not grasping some aspect of a character. Once that’s straightened out, all is well. But not always. Characters can occasionally be as stubborn as their creators, and then we have to accept a different situation. The rector in A False Mirror was determined to interfere in the resolution of the case for reasons that grew out of his own beliefs. We tried to convince him to change his mind, but he had no intention of doing so.

Choosing the setting for each book is exciting too. We begin with a wish list, based on reading and research, then plan our itinerary accordingly. We follow that but not religiously—sometimes unexpected possibilities distract us. For instance, the Exe Valley, where The Murder Stone is set, is a lovely but secluded valley where few tourists ever go. Something about it caught our imagination but we really couldn’t settle on a plot that suited the atmosphere. Then, when our editor asked if we’d like to write a stand-alone, it suddenly came into its own. A village in Northumberland was another place we happened to drive through—and the way the village looked inward, away from the fields that surrounded it, struck us. A small wood not far away seemed dark and secretive, as if it hadn’t changed for centuries. And the two merged in A Long Shadow. We spent some time in “Duddington”, and never saw a living thing—not even a bird or a dog. And then all at once across the fields came a flood of brown sheep, heading for new pastures, herded by a trio of men. Where was everyone else? We never found out.

Researching the war is sometimes a wrenching experience. We’ve known and spoken with many veterans. We also read first-hand sources and try to limit research to works written at the time, although many new books on the subject have been published. Much of that material can be considered hindsight, which means that neither Rutledge nor his contemporaries had access to it. And there’s the wall of silence of men who can’t talk about their worst experiences. And the eyes of men of who saw too many horrors. We’ve also watched the gates of memory open and the nightmare spill out. For many, it’s nighttime that’s the worst. We’ve spoken to psychiatrists and psychologists about men like Rutledge and they feel we’ve got it right. That’s seconded by men who have been there and write us from time to time. It’s important to remember that Rutledge’s condition isn’t a convenient ploy but a continuing struggle with no certainty of the outcome. Just as in real life.

By the way—2008 was the 90th anniversary of the Great War’s close, Armistice Day, which began at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Both Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings considered that war as the pivotal event of the Twentieth Century, the source of so many of the political problems we’re facing every day. A war to end all war, still touching our lives today, ninety years on.

What’s in the future for Rutledge? After The Red Door there are a good many more questions we want to pose, and as long as fans eagerly await the next book, we’ll happily oblige.

We’ve written one stand-alone novel that has given us a chance to explore the women’s side of the Great War. Rutledge doesn’t appear in The Murder Stone, and it was rather interesting to see how well we could cope with a feminine point of view after so many years of dealing with a male protagonist. The Murder Stone’s success surprised us and that in some fashion probably led to our recent decision to introduce a new series. It begins in the war years but soon moves to other areas of interest. The author of A Duty to the Dead, will be Caroline Todd, although it’s the same team at work. The schedule is a Rutledge in January as always, and a Bess Crawford in late summer. All in all, it has been a great run, and we’ve enjoyed Rutledge, Francesca, and now Bess. Over the years reviews have been outstanding, award nominations have been flattering, and the mystery community, from booksellers to fans to other authors, has been warm and supportive. Above all, we have met Ian Rutledge, who has and will be a challenge to our skills as writers.

It’s possible that books will no longer exist in a few dozen years, when electronic methods of presenting novels take over from pen and paper. You can’t curl up with a good device, the way you can with a book on a winter’s evening by the fire and, on a beach, the blowing sand can cut an electronic story short. But if imagination still exists and the old cry of Tell me a story still works, there will also be a place for those of us who create mystery for readers who can’t resist a good book. Let’s hope that in the process the friendly mystery bookstore finds a way to survive or we will all be the poorer for that.

About the Author

Charles Todd is the pen name of the mother and son writing team Charles and Caroline Todd. The authors are best known for their Inspector Ian Rutledge series set in post–World
War I England. A Test of Wills, the first in the series, was nominated for an Edgar Award and won Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s Barry Gardiner
Award. The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association named it one of their 100
Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century and it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Wings of Fire, the second in the series, was short-listed for the first Ellis Peters Mystery Award in the UK. Search in the Dark won the
1999 Reviewers’ Choice Award from Romantic Times Magazine. Their newest series features Bess Crawford and is set in the 1900s. Charles and Caroline Todd live in Delaware and North Carolina respectively.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2010 by Charles Todd. Originally published by The Mysterious Bookshop.

Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

ISBN: 978-1-5040-7463-6

This edition published in 2022 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com

MYSTERIOUS PROFILES

FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.

Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.

MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.

FIND OUT MORE AT

WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FOLLOW US:

@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.

The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.

58 Warren Street
info@mysteriousbookshop.com

(212) 587-1011

Monday through Saturday

11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

FIND OUT MORE AT:

www.mysteriousbookshop.com

FOLLOW US:

@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop

SUBSCRIBE:

The Mysterious Newsletter

Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com

FOLLOW US
@ OpenRoadMedia

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Ian Rutledge
- About the Author
- Copyright