A False Mirror (Ian Rutledge #9) - Charles Todd

This is one of the paperbacks from the HPB trips. I didn't realize it was part of a series when I picked it up, but the main character, Ian Rutledge, solves mysteries and has 8 previous cases under his belt. I was intrigued by the setting of post WWI, and the summary for the mystery was unique.

A man is attacked while out walking by the water in a smaller town. When his wife's former lover hears of it, he freaks out and rushes to her house and ends up taking her hostage. After that, the husband is barely alive, and people are being killed. The former lover served with Rutledge in the war, and the suspect insists that he'll only talk to his former comrade.

The thing about this novel is that it was weird. First, it's number 9 in the series, so I wasn't used to Hamish-in-the-head. This is also one of the men he served with, but this one died and now harasses Rutledge day and night as a sort of conscience ghost (?). Another thing was the plot. It was unique, and normally, I love that. But this one got super weird. The initial victim disappears, and we assume he's dead, and then other people die, and we're not sure if the assumed dead guy is committing the acts, or if there's another murderer. And then the answer just didn't seem to make enough sense to satisfy. I suppose it made sense, but it also kind of didn't, so I was torn on the "villain." And then it just ended. There weren't really many people to root for in this one, and you didn't find out what really happened to them anyway, so it's a lot of unresolved feelings. 

The book overall was enough to keep me entertained, but I wouldn't pick up another one. Rutledge kept referring to a case in London that I didn't know about, so there was that. I also didn't ever really get used to Hamish. And at the end of the book, I didn't really get a feel for enough of Rutledge's personality to say one way or the other whether he was interesting enough to follow. Since this is his 9th adventure, I'm not very optimistic about his prospects to show up in my reading pile again. The writing style was fine, I just wasn't a fan of the weird plot or the detective.