The Gate Keeper (Inspector Ian Rutledge, #20)

December 1920.
Hours after his sister’s wedding, late at night, a restless Ian Rutledge drives down a country road somewhere en route to Ipswich. Haunted by the past, he narrowly misses a motorcar stopped in the middle of a desolate road. Standing beside the vehicle is a frightened young woman in party dress—and blood on her hands, a dead man at her feet.

She swears she didn’t kill Stephen Wentworth. A stranger was standing in the middle of the road, so they had to stop. Wentworth got out to ask if the stranger needed help, and without warning, he shot Wentworth straight through the heart, then vanished into the night. The shaken woman insists it all happened so quickly, she never saw the man’s face. There is no trace, other than the tiny carved wolf left as a calling card.

Although he is a witness after the fact, Rutledge persuades the Yard to give him the inquiry, since he’s on the scene. But is he seeking justice—or fleeing painful memories in London?

Wentworth was well-liked, yet his family paints a malevolent portrait, calling him a murderer. But who did Wentworth kill? Is his death retribution? Or has his companion lied?

Wolfpit, his village, has a notorious history: in medieval times, the last wolf in England was allegedly trapped and killed there.

When a second suspicious death occurs, then a third, the evidence suggests that a dangerous predator is on the loose, and that death is closer than Rutledge knows.