Wings of Fire

Wings of Fire (1998) Charles Todd

The second Ian Rutledge mystery finds Rutledge sent to Cornwall, to look into the deaths of a prominent family: a double suicide and a fall. Adding to the confusion, one of the suicides turned out to be a famous poet, O.A. Manning, whose poems of love and war and death deeply touched many people, including Inspector Rutledge, who carried a book of her poems in the trenches during The Great War.

In speaking of her poetry, the rector says the following:

It’s a very interesting study of the face of evil. Olivia understood that, just as well as she understood love and war and the warmth of life. As a priest I found it… disturbing. That she should know the dark side of man so much better than I. That she should believe that Gold tolerated evil because it has its place in His scheme. That there are some who are not capable of goodness in any sense. The lost, the damned, the sons of Satan, whatever you choose to call them, exist among us, and cannot be saved because they don’t have the capacity for recognizing the purpose of good. As if it had been left out of the clay from which they were formed.

Interesting thoughts, shared with a man seeking a murderer.

And again, flashes of the war.

“I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty–a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Men who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and the war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you and edge on death, and you were grateful.

The history I found interesting here, was the blending of so many children–Rosamund had six children by three different husbands (all of whom died). Although typically it would be men–widowers–who lost their wives in childbirth and remarried quickly to have a mother for their children, such a blending was common.

It’s interesting how blended families are becoming common again, not through death, as it would have been prior to WWII, but through divorce. It never fails to fascinate me how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Again, I don’t think this book was quite as good was the Bess Crawford books, but I still enjoyed it.
Rating: 7/10

Published by St. Martin’s Minotaur

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