The Gate Keeper

by Charles Todd

This is the latest book by the mother and son team. In this book Rutledge's sister has just gotten married.  He wishes her the very best but is sad at "losing" the person he is closest to.  After the wedding celebration he packs a small suitcase and decides to go for a drive.... if he just wanted a drive, why did he pack a bag?

As he is driving well into the night he comes upon a stopped car with a man lying shot dead on the road.  A distraught woman is standing by the man.  Rutledge tells the woman to take his car and go get the local police.  All the woman can tell him is the murdered man was driving her home after a dinner engagement.  He stopped when someone was standing on the road and exchanged a few words with the person on the road (which the woma did not hear).  Then the person on the road shot him.

Rutledge offers to take over the investigation and is given permission to do so but a local police official is angered by this.  Rutledge intereviews everyone he can think of and finds out that the young man was wealthy but was running a local bookstore. He seemed to be a pleasant and well liked person, so why was he killed.  He did escape to Peru at one point shortly after his engagement was broken off.  Could it have something to do with that?

When he meets the dead man's parents he find they, especially the Mother, have little affection or regard for him.  The mother believes he killed his twin brother when a small child.

Then another man is killed, a local farmer.  He is found shot on the road in front of his home.  Rutledge learns that the man was lured out by a letter asking him to come and judge the quality of a cow that was for sale.  The person who recommended the letter writer to the second dead man denies any knowledge of the letter writer. 

Rutledge finds out that a book the bookseller, Wentworth, ordered for the Farmer was stolen from his shop.  As several figures in the story serves in the war Rutledge wonders if there is an old grudge behind all this.  Eventually he manages to track down who owned the book originally and is shocked to learn that the agent who handled the book sale for the woman has also been murdered.

Eventually Rutledge finds out that the woman had secretly married a wealthy man but he was killed in the war, she had left his family, where she had been working as a servant.  The man's brother had sent her a copy of an old book about ancient apples that she had admired when she works with the family.  What she doesn't know is that the marriage certificate that would prove her marriage has been bound intothe book (a bad "joke") by the man's brother who is now living in the family estate.

It turns out that this man's wife has been the one doing the murders as she fears someone will undo the binding and learn the truth.  This will ruin her husband and her life and also ruin the financial future of their son.

These books are always entertaining, the author team do a great job of presenting England just after the second world war, sharing the lives and trials of those who survived the war, and keeping us guessing until the end.