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by Stenerson
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by Garry Weare
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by Bil Keane
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by Livingston
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by John Wesley Howard
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(Larger Image)
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The Blood-Dimmed Tide
by Rennie Airth
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Viking Adult (2005-07-21)
ISBN: 0670899968
EAN: 9780670899968
Dewy Decimal #: 823.914
Hardcover: 352 pages
Release Date: 2005-07-25
SKU: mon0000045926
Condition: Very Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
With The New York Times Notable Book River of Darkness, Rennie Airth established himself as a formidable master of suspense. Now, in The Blood-Dimmed Tide, Airth returns with a macabre tale, filled with fascinating historical detail, of the social struggles of post–World War I Britain and the looming menace of Hitler’s Germany. It is 1932, and former Inspector John Madden leads a quiet life in rural England with his wife and children—until a young village girl is savagely murdered. The crime catapults Madden into the grisly world of a brutal killer. Along with his former colleagues at Scotland Yard, Madden soon finds himself enlisting the help of the British secret service and the German police. Together they use the burgeoning science of criminal psychology in order to grasp the workings of the twisted mind of a cunning, sophisticated murderer—but can Madden prevent him from killing again?
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Amazon.com Review
Rennie Airth's first John Madden historical thriller, River of Darkness, found a place on more than a few "best of the year" lists in 1999--with good reason. Set in post-World War I England, it was serial-killer fiction of an unusually exalted order, with Madden, then a taciturn and wearily pragmatic veteran-turned-Scotland Yard inspector, investigating the eerie slaughter of a well-respected family in Surrey. Fortunately, Airth's first sequel was worth the six-year wait. The Blood-Dimmed Tide (which takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem) finds Madden now retired and living peacefully on a farm in Surrey with his doctor wife, the former Helen Blackwell, and their two children, 10-year-old Rob and 6-year-old Lucy. The year is 1932, and the precipitous rise of the Nazis in Germany leaves many of their fellow countrymen, as well as no few Brits, worried for the future peace and stability of the European continent. More immediately concerning for Madden, however, is his discovery of the corpse of pubescent Alice Bridger--raped, disfigured, and secreted near a tramps' backwoods campsite. Suspicion falls quickly on a vagrant known as Beezy, who was supposedly visiting the area, but Madden--with his remarkable insight into crime ("Madden's always had a way of seeing things clearly, of seeing through them, or rather beyond them," relates a former police colleague)--thinks this is more than an isolated homicide. Sure enough, a records check turns up similar slayings elsewhere in England, dating back to 1929, as well as an active investigation by German law enforcement into half a dozen dead girls in Bavaria and Prussia. What accounts for both the wide range of these mutilations, and the lengthy lag time between them? Could the police be looking for a psychopathic traveler, or worse, a rogue spy who's managed to maintain a respectable front at his international postings, while satisfying his malevolent appetites in his spare hours? And what is the "devil’s mark" that this killer reportedly bears? Airth is a fastidious plotter, expert in trickling out twists that heighten story tension but don't leave readers awash in red herrings. Although Madden's role here is somewhat less than it was in River of Darkness--a consequence of his strong-willed wife trying to protect him from further hurt, after the horrendous events of that previous tale--the author compensates by giving us a supporting cast of amply dimensioned Yard types, led by Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair, a perceptive Scot whose doggedness pairs well with Madden's gift for inspiration. While Airth fails, oddly, to exploit a couple of opportunities for interesting plot turns at book's end, his psychological portrait of the murderer imbues Tide with a fine pathos, and the backdrop of Nazi power-grabbing sets the stage for what is supposed to be a third and final Madden yarn. Let’s hope that novel appears in more expeditious fashion. --J. Kingston Pierce
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Customer Reviews
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A compelling "sequel"
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-08-07
Airth's two books, the first revolving around the immediate aftermath of WWI and the second leading up to the chaos of the late 1930s, are both compelling narratives. The first is more of a classic whodunnit, with Scotland Yard's John Madden tracking down a (presumably) deranged murderer. The second has a different tone, one that is more about the looming breakdown of order rather than the re-establishment of a civil society after the horrors of the Great War. So I don't find the different approach and different kind of narrative (one where Madden isn't always the chief investigator) as irritating as some reviewers do.
In fact, I see this as a novel that really just happens to take the form of a mystery. In that light, it an author's ability to portray character that is of the greatest value, and here Airth triumphs. He recognizes that human beings are inherently complex beings and avoids all the easy cliches to which too many authors fall victim. The plot is sophisticated and I found it gripping in the extreme. He is also more skilful when weaving psychological elements into the plot (more so, for instance, than Jacqueline Winspear in her newer series revolving around Maisie Dobbs.) The psychological insights always feel as if they belong where they are written, rather than having value only to set the stage for the book's conclusions.
I only wish I would wake up one day to find another novel by this author had been published...!
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A Simpler Time, A Darker Time
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-08-03
This septuagenarian Anglophile was delighted to learn that author Airth is a contemporary, also born in 1935. That item, learned following a most enjoyable journey through this book, somehow enhances the pleasant afterglow.
England between the World Wars I and II - the very setting inspires that strange nostalgia felt for a placetime one never experienced. Scotland Yard, taking on not only a perpetrator of bloody crimes, but by extension the growing threat of evil across the Channel - what more could one seek?
Even without seeking, a geezer would be pleased if the story's primary good guy were himself also a geezer, reluctantly extracted from retirement in order to solve the crime and subdue the bad guy. Airth's John Madden fills that bill indeed.
And one might imagine that the author would title the story with a line from a classic work which itself seemed to portend the rise of Hitler. Yeats' "The Second Coming" not only provides this title, "The Blood-Dimmed Tide," it also includes a well-known line which another John Madden might endorse: "...the center cannot hold...".
And finally, one might suppose that the author could include a feminine paradox - a woman physician, ahead of her time in that regard, but alas, also prone to those irrational emotional outbursts of which her gender has been accused since cave days. That too! Five stars from me.
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More than blood
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-05-12
Airth's second mystery builds inexorably to a chilling climax; along the way he takes on the privilege of government to protect their own and the intricacies of seeking justice while avoiding the displeasure of superiors. Nearly as good as the first, Airth does not seem interested in rushing a book to market each year and dumbing down the genre. It is worth the wait.
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Good Story, Drab Execution
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-08-22
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Airth's River of Darkness introduced John Madden, a psychological casualty of World War I turned police inspector. River of Darkness was set in the early `20s and was a reasonably effective evocation of the echoes in the British countryside of the slaughter of the Great War.
The Blood-Dimmed Tide revisits Madden a decade later. He's retired from police work and become a middling farmer. The case of interest turns on the search for a terrifying killer of young girls. The plot is interesting, but the execution is disappointing. Airth tries too hard to put Madden in the middle of things, endowing him with preternatural instincts that just don't sell. The dialogue is frequently as trite as a Berlitz training record.
The setting could be the saving grace of the work, but it doesn't come to life. Madden's investigations take place within weeks of Hitler's rise to chancellor. Subsidiary and rather unimaginative characters fret about what is going to become of Germany, and every reader knows the answer. The Depression, too, figures in a turn or two of the plot. But, on the whole, Airth does not convey the texture of the times, of the impact of changing technology, of the erosion of British ascendancy, of the place of talking motion pictures and recordings, of the era of radio, not even of the residing nausea with war that became Appeasement. Airth's 1930s Britain is timeless, drab and routine.
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Disappointing, long-awaited sequel
Rating  (2)
Date: 2006-06-16
3 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
As a huge fan of Airth's first novel, A River of Darkness, I was severely disappointed with this second John Madden mystery. The author hampers Madden's involvement by having him retire from Scotland Yard to manage a farm in Surrey with his family. His contribution to this mystery, which involves a brutal child killer, is thus marginal at best. He finds one of the first bodies and deals with the killer at the end, but other detectives, associated with Madden in the previous book, do most of the sleuthing. Airth creates a really nasty killer in this outing, and the unveiling of his true identity is a treat. Nevertheless, I wanted more John Madden, and any reader of this book would have to agree that his presence was surely lacking.
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