In his extraordinary mysteries Charles Todd transcends the boundaries of the form to bring us works built on the basic premise of any good fiction--to show and reflect on the myriad facets of the human condition. SEARCH THE DARK, the latest in his post- World War I series featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge, sends the war-damaged detective to a small Dorset town to locate two missing children. The body of a woman, assumed to be their mother, has been found. The local police have a suspect, a mentally unhinged veteran who believes he has glimpsed his wife and children on a railway platform there, even though he'd been told they'd died in an enemy bombing.

Face-to-face with a darkness more profound than that in his own mind, and goaded by Hamish, his jeering omnipresent demon, Rutledge goes beyond his authorized mission to find the answer to the questions that torment him. Is the poor devil in the local jail guilty of murder? If not, who is? And still gnawing at him and his superiors is the question: What has become of the children?

In his most moving and gripping work yet, Todd has created a tale so engrossing that he is sure to enthrall his devoted readers and send new ones back to the bookstore to find the first two books of the series.