The narrative races along in short chapters that explain as much as the reader needs to know, and no more. All the wounds we have been discussing show these characteristics.''

Say, ''is a short, stabbing thrust followed by a half-twist to break the friction as the weapon is withdrawn. Run his enemy through, in fact.'' The correct method, he goes on to ''The average soldier, armed with rifle and bayonet, will automatically thrust the weapon in as far as it will go. This is the work of a bayonet, the war-weary Inspector John Madden explains - one wielded by a man with skillĪnd training. The police and the reader get the first rough hint of what is to come from the wounds inflicted on the Fletcher family and their servants at Melling Lodge.Īll but one of the victims have been stabbed with a narrow blade that penetrated just deep enough to kill. It's the tactics and terrain, the morale and the characters that make the difference between an averageĪirth has balanced savagery and civilization neatly, and given civilization just the barest edge. But the suspense novelist's basic strategy is always obvious. I would be giving nothing away, I'm sure, if I told you that the beautiful woman doctor introduced on page 27 would become a This is genre stuff: ''a novel of suspense.'' We know early on who the killer is, and we are made to wonder only when and how he'll killĪgain, and when and how he'll be caught. Rennie Airth, a former journalist, makes no pretense about the kind of book he is writing. Men tried hard to believe the horror was over, and distant, and no longer around them or among them.īut what if a psychopathic ex-soldier were loosed on pastoral Surrey three years after the armistice? And what if the Scotland Yard inspector on his trail were himself a veteran of the Somme, a hollow survivor just going through the motions of life? ''River

The upright bobby - seemed at once comforting and alien.

Some 300,000 troops from the British Expeditionaryįorce were killed thousands of them heaved their last breaths from lungs scorched and corroded by poison gas.įor those who made it back to England's green and pleasant land, once-familiar surroundings - the quiet villages and comfortable manor houses, the loyal servants in the kitchen, the rugged gamekeepers walking the forests, the local publican and Knee-deep in mud, they slogged through carnage that came to seem a natural part of the landscape. N the third battle of Ypres, three years into World War I, the slaughter was such that no man in the trenches could truly believe that he might survive,Īnd many of those who lived through it lost their ability to imagine home.

A thriller about a British World War I veteran who is also a psychopathic killer.

River of darkness by rennie airth