The red door

The disappearance of a prominent author and missionary leads Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge into the English countryside to investigate the death of a war widow.

The twelfth novel in Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge series, The Red Door combines some of the best elements of modern mysteries and those of the Golden Age of Christie, Sayers, and Marsh. A close-knit family guarding a family secret, the English landed-class of the 1920s, a single-minded detective determined to find the truth are all staples of the Golden Age. But Todd adds the more modern elements of a flawed central character (haunted by the First World War), and characters who know “Chin up, old boy!” is not always the best response to the modern world.

I haven't read any of the other books in this series, and doing so might have increased my understanding of some of the minor parts of the book (an old romance, a case in Scotland that traumatized Rutledge), but the book can be read and understood without reading the first eleven books.

My only complaints are minor (in the first paragraph, a woman considers her reflection in order to describe what she looks like to the reader; a Scottish character whose accent is conveyed through all sorts of non-standard spellings and apostrophes), but overall it was an enjoyable read.