Racing the Devil

Racing the Devil opens in the shadow of the Battle of the Somme, where a group of English officers make a pact: if they survive the war, they will meet in Paris and race motorcars from the city to Nice. When the reunion is marred by a reckless driver who forces two vehicles off a mountain road, the incident goes unresolved. A year later, a fatal crash on a rain-slicked road in England reopens the wound — and Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge suspects the two events are connected by a killer determined to stay hidden.

Simon Prebble narrates this nineteenth entry in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series with the restrained precision the character demands — a man haunted by World War I and the voice of a fallen soldier in his mind. The South Downs setting carries an atmosphere of bucolic secrets and suppressed grief, and Prebble renders the psychological tension between Rutledge's fragile sanity and his detective's instincts with quiet authority. At eleven hours, the pacing allows Todd's careful plotting to breathe.