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River of Darkness
River of Darkness
River of Darkness
Audiobook13 hours

River of Darkness

Written by Rennie Airth

Narrated by Christopher Kay

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

In 1921, the bloodied bodies of Colonel Fletcher, his wife and two staff are found in a manor house in Surrey. The police have put the murders down to a violent robbery, but Detective Inspector Madden from Scotland Yard has his own suspicions. In the meantime the killer is plotting his second strike.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 15, 2010
ISBN9781449853433
River of Darkness
Author

Rennie Airth

Rennie Airth was born in South Africa and now lives in Italy. Formerly he worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, and is the award-winning author of six acclaimed John Madden mysteries.

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Reviews for River of Darkness

Rating: 3.8967065437125745 out of 5 stars
4/5

334 ratings21 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A mystery set in that very evocative era between the world wars, in which a police detective recognizes the kind of obsession a killer is driven by as he prepares for his victims. The psychology at the end is a bit heavy handed, but probably apt for the era, and I found the plot and writing very engaging.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A dark wave is coming. Can Morgan, Hunter, et. al stop it or is it the end?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Unlike Cherry Ames, Sweep didn't disappoint at all this year. Despite another move away from Morgan as the narrator, the story was gripping and intense. It is exactly the kind of easy-to-read, full immersion book that is perfect for enjoying holidays.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this book Alisa runs away from home to meet her mother's family. Yep, they are all witches. At first it is a bit odd and some relatives are happier to see her than others. She also meets a charming young witch, unfortunately he is already dating her cousin. She may also find the source of her seemingly uncontrollable magic and help her family in the long run.I really enjoyed this book. We find out more about Alisa and her family. The change of location was nice too. I only have two more books in the series. I am going to miss it when I finish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    River Of Darkness. The first John Madden novel. Rennie Airth. 1999. I really enjoyed this book. The critics compare the author to P. D. James; he is good but not that good. World War I is over and Madden returns from the front to re-join the police department. A loner, he is somber and quiet. The changes in his personality are attributed the war. He is assigned a horrendous murder case: an entire family is murdered in what would now be considered a home invasion. Before he can get a handle on this case, another home invasion occurs. Madden works methodically and with the help of an attractive young doctor manages to indentify the murderer. Some might consider this book slow moving, but Arith just takes his time like P.D. James does. Violence and sex scenes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is crime fiction - a historical mystery/police procedural set in post WWI featuring Scotland Yard Inspector John Madden. Madden, having lost his wife and baby daughter to influenza and then served in WWI in the trenches, is back on the force at Scotland Yard. As one would expect, he is not the same man and carries his own scars from his experiences. When we meet up with him, he has just been assigned to solve the grisly multiple murders of a household in Surrey. This is very well done with good pacing, suspenseful even though we know pretty early on who the murderer is. I liked how twisty it was and the details of the newly evolving forensic techniques.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I believe I enjoyed River of Darkness more comprehensively due to watching Midsomer Murders on Netflix. It is a British television detective drama series (1997-Present) set within small English country villages. The crime drama series is based on Caroline Graham's Chief Inspector Barnaby book series, as originally adapted for television by Anthony Horowitz.

    River of Darkness is not only a detective story but also presents a vivid psychological and haunting thriller as men resumed their lives after WWI. Inspector John Madden from Scotland Yard is a multi-faceted character and is given depth by the author in many different and sometimes subtle ways which adds increasing interest for the reader. In a murder mystery of gruesome circumstances this novel heightens credibility with the latest developments in criminal psychology of that time period and also a “supporting cast” of characters that each add vital aspects to either the criminal investigation and/or to the human interest in John Madden.

    I look forward to reading more of this series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After losing his wife and child to influenza, Inspector John Madden joined the service and lived through the horrors of WWI. He's now resumed his job with Scotland Yard and is sent to investigate the murder of an entire family in Surrey. There are items missing from the home, so it is initially judged as a robbery gone wrong, but John quickly sees through the surface and realizes the intent of the intruder was murder from the beginning. When he discovers the injuries were caused by a bayonet, they realize they may be seeking a former soldier. While investigating, the gloomy Madden meets Dr. Helen Blackwell and the two form an instant bond.

    I enjoyed reading about the time period, and the procedures used to narrow suspects were brilliant. Through much of the book the main character John Madden was gloomy and depressed. Other than the fact of his being haunted by the war, not much effort was made in the way of character development. I will have to read the next book to see if this is corrected. The character of Helen Blackwell, while perfectly nice, was a bit too modern for my taste. She's definitely not a woman of her time. I enjoyed reading about Billy Styles, the young cop eager to prove himself who is recruited as Madden's assistant. Overall there is a lot to recommend this book, with only a few minor problems.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm enjoyed the story, but I could do with a lot less of red faces of embarrassment.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an excellent book. It is very suspenseful, right up to the end. The mystery is well crafted as are the characters.

    This is very similar to the Ian Rutledge series by Charles Todd. They are both set in the same time period and have a Scotland Yard detective who was damaged by WWI as the protagonist. The final similarity is that the are both excellent books.

    I look forward to the next entry in the series.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Introspection could be a subtitle for this post WW1 mystery. Virtually all the protagonists have been personally affected by WW1, either as a participant or related to those who were engaged. It was a brutal war in an era when mental illness and its treatment were stuck in a cycle of ignore or sequester as solutions. Horrific, multiple murders occur in a small village and a seriously damaged but not deranged detective is sent from London to solve the mystery. Some excellently drawn characters, including the villain, sustain an interesting plot with some mostly believable twists and turns in its conclusion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The effect of WW I on the survivors continues to provide a reservoir of themes for authors of English detective novels. Charles Todd's (actually a mother-son team) Ian Rutledge, a Scottish detective is one example. Rutledge suffers from guilt-ridden hallucinations.

    Airth's Inspector John Madden is even gloomier having lost his wife and daughter to the great flu epidemic. Madden is the lead investigator in a series of horrific crimes. In what appears to be an attempted robbery, an entire family has been massacred. Madden, following a search of nearby woods, discovers evidence that the family's home had been under observation for a period of time from a dugout that bore unsettling similarities to battlefield trench observation posts. Further evidence leads the police to suspect the work is just one man, a former soldier who kills his victims with a bayonet in the manner taught for use on the battlefield.

    We experience some of the action through Pike, the killer's point of view, and realize that facing the memories of war and dealing with those traumas often takes a variety of mechanisms as Pike and Madden are contrasted. I hope this is the beginning of a series featuring Inspector Madden.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5

    Back in the days when I reviewed a lot for the late lamented Infinity Plus and Crescent Blues, I made a point of offering the small-press and even self-published titles the same level playing field as the stuff emanating from the big boys. This meant that, of course, in the pursuit of many undoubted pearls (the entire Akashic list, the stories of C.S. Thompson, etc., etc.), I also had to wade through an exceptional amount of, er, swine. In addition, I had to get used to the text that was fundamentally strong and filled with the kind of vibrancy you'd never hope for in a conglomerate-published novel, yet was packed with typos and grammatical howlers.

    And then there were the ones that offered the latter characteristic while also being abysmally plotted and written as if in crayon. In general, I quietly didn't review those. (One of the ghastliest of them I later noticed had been reviewed elsewhere. I found the reviewer hadn't shared my milquetoste compunction. "THIS IS THE WORST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL I HAVE EVER READ," he thundered.) And, on the same grounds, I probably wouldn't have reviewed River of Darkness, which differs from other outrageously badly written and edited novels I've read only in that it was published not in POD by the (since defunct) Snotwrangler Press of Poughkeepsie but by Viking.

    And it looked so good from the outside!

    We're in the immediate post-WWI years in Surrey, UK, where there's just been a spectacular massacre in a country mansion. Scotland Yard sends Inspector John Madden to investigate. He's a man with a tragic past and so psychologically deep he can hardly get his trousers unbuttoned without a rigorous routine of introspection ("By fuck, this man's interesting in all directions," I thought as my head hammered irrevocably into the pillow), but unbutton 'em he does pretty promptly in the company of local dreamboat doctor Helen Blackwell -- proving, I suppose, the old adage that some women will do anything to stop you talking about your tragic past (op. cit.). Madden suspects there'll be other massacres along these same lines in the Home Counties, and sure enough he's right. Obviously Blackwell is going to have a lucky escape thanks to Our Man's relentlesss pluck.

    As implied above, the text is littered with typos, not just of the kind where a letter has been transposed or a word omitted but including instances of sentences of dialogue being inadvertently run together; a specialty is the omission of quotation marks at the opening of a paragraph of dialogue, or even in the middle of a paragraph which mixes dialogue and narrative. All of this you expect in PODville; you don't expect it in a Viking hardback. You also don't expect the plot imbecility whereby (a) Our Man knows the villain makes dugouts near where he observes the next targets of his attacks; (b) the villain has made such a dugout and is observing a family; (c) Our Man and his team have discovered such a dugout on a hill overlooking that family's home; (d) they capture the dugout digger but it's the wrong man, because in the whole of England he chose the same hill in which to dig a dugout as the bad man did, and it just happens that the cops, given a million hills in England they could have found dugouts in, found one here. Even the Snotwrangler Press of Poughkeepsie might have balked at this sort of nonsense.

    I hardly need to add that, when I checked the Amazon listing of the book to see if, curse the thought, there had been sequels, I found not just that this was so -- there's apparently now a successful John Madden series -- but also copious reader reviews saying what spiffy, impeccable storytelling this was. Well, I don't care: the book's a complete mess and should never have been published in its current form.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    First in a mystery series. I suspect the others won't have quite the emotional impact of this one, but I'm hopeful, because Airth is a marvelous writer. The prose isn't the best or prettiest and the book seems to be written in a somewhat stilted third person, but that doesn't matter. Here, the story and characters rule, and what a story. In a matter-of-fact way, a not-very-matter-of-fact story unfolds in the English countryside in the years following World War I. John Madden, a war vet and an inspector with Scotland Yard, is sent to investigate the brutal murders of a couple and their servants at a secluded manor. Madden, who lost his wife and baby before the war, brings his emotional baggage to the job, but his outlook on life is challenged when he meets Dr. Helen Blackwell, a vivacious doctor who administers to the town surrounding the manor. As John begins to suspect a serial killer is at work, with Helen's encouragement, he looks into the relatively new and controversial area of criminal psychology for answers.This isn't much of a whodunit; the killer's pov is introduced about midway through the book, although it isn't clear he is the killer right off. But as the book develops, it becomes somewhat of a battle of wits as Madden and his team try to get the killer before he kills again. There's a thrilling climax, and the satisfaction in learning how all the pieces of the puzzle/loose ends all fit in. I'm looking forward to reading more of John Madden's adventures. In fact, I've got the next two on order.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a straight-forward mystery, set in England after WWI, and written in a more current style with more explicit sexual content and more graphic violence than one would find in period books. The author found a nice balance with this - I found the setting very believable, it didn't seem like 21st century people shoehorned in 1922 (I actually don't remember what year it is set in, so let's say that as a ballpark); the domestic details and lifestyle information felt right. At the same time, you get a very candid description of the CRIMES that were generally left more implied in mystery novels of the time. For me personally, as you know I have Maisie Dobbs issues (sorry, Maisie fans), this was a much better approach for a present-day writer than Maisie, who often has the mindset of a 2011 overly earnest recent college graduate, and yet manages to be more cloyingly twee than anything found in Sayers, Marsh, or Christie. In this book, Scotland Yard investigators are called to a murder scene that starts off looking like a B&E gone wrong, and quickly turns out to be the work of a more creepy serial killer.There are some sort of standard elements that ... hmmm, they didn't detract from the book for me, but they do give you a little wave to say "yes, we're genre markers!" ... the reluctance on the part of the Yard higher-ups to embrace "modern" crime investigation methods so we can laugh behind our hands at them, the adversarial "other detective" who is career-climbing and thus dismissive of our protagonists' risk-taking approach to investigation, the sensational press reporters, those sorts of things. Even our protagonist detective, who is, of course, damaged from his time in the trenches of WWI, which sounds so dismissive and I don't mean it that way, but it's hard to read and not immediately call up Lord Peter and think "yep, got it, okay, what's going to happen next with this plot?" And it has all the nice things that, speaking as an American reader, I know about in the first place from reading Sayers, Marsh and Christie - how the pubs work and what are the roles of the household staff and what the War Office does and the endless effort that goes into maintaining a motor car (thanks, Bunter!). The love interest was easier to buy if you could say to yourself "hey, I like these characters and it's nice for them, so I'm going to take this at face value and move on" and not insist on being convinced by the writing or events of the book. Grade: A-, it was a very good mystery, but it's not trying to be more than a mystery.Recommended: To fans of this particular genre who won't be bothered by the un-coziness of it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Compelling police procedural set in post-WWI Britain. The recreation of the historical period is really compelling, particularly the extent to which England was still a rural, agricultural country in 1920, which meant that in many ways it had much more in common with life a hundred years earlier than forty years later. The characters are interesting and well drawn, and the suspenseful search for the killer keeps you turning the pages.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Good crime fiction and an eloquent description of the period between the wars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    terrific post WW1 mystery
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In England in 1921, the country was still recovering from WWI. War wounded were seen throughout the country. What couldn't be seen were those who were psychologically wounded and in need of help.With this background, at the start of the novel, a family is murdered in Surrey. Police at first believe that it is a violent robbery but when Inspector John Madden is called in from Scotland Yard, he views the scene and thinks it's something else. Madden has spent time in the trenches in the war and believes that this is the work of a psychopath who will continue killing until he is stopped.John Madden is a well developed protagonist. He's knowledgeable and determined to find the killer. His personal history is brought in nicely so that the reader gets to know him and sympathise with him. The respect with which he is held by his assistant, Billy Styles, gives credibility to Madden's knowledge of people and crime.The setting is the English countryside with gardens and country manors surrounded by woods. The descriptions are vivid and help the reader see a clearer picture of what live may have been like.The theme is relevant with the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The author is telling his readers how little post tramatic syndrome is known and what psychological impact it causes.A most enjoyable read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Much more assured than most first novels, and when you add in that it's a subgenre (historical) of a genre (mystery) full of embarrassing first novelists, it's amazing how well it fits snugly into its place and characters.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The language used is very neutral so the feeling of 1921 never really comes through. No local dialect/timely slang is used. I think using some would have added some flavor. Also the action is pretty fast paced for a world where motorcycles and cars aren’t as fast as they are today. In one scene, a local cop gets the use of a car and it’s a treat because the local commander thinks that feet should be transport enough. That brought the times forward.I liked the “Sampson of the Yard” enemy within the force. He’s so bogged down with the idea that only traditional police work can work, he ridicules use of psychologists and trace evidence. The murderer handing him the weapon voluntarily would be the only evidence conclusive enough for him. Now men are sent to jail based on microscopic fibers and partial prints. Amazing how forensic evidence has gained credibility through what must have been cases like this one.