Rusted Souls (A Tom Harper Mystery, 11)
Tom Harper, Chief Constable of Leeds, is about to retire. His time is spent between his Town Hall office with its endless mountains of paperwork, his old stomping ground of Millgarth, and home with his beloved wife, Annabelle, whose scattered reality is slowly disappearing down the dementia rabbit hole. Work, family, and home are Harper’s solitary musings. Now he has six weeks to solve two new cases, and satisfactory solutions are the key to planning a peaceful retirement.
Four ex-army men commit a series of jewelry store robberies, playing Robin Hood to the dispossessed of Leeds by leaving their hauls on random doorsteps. An alderman is blackmailed by indiscreet letters to his mistress. The parallels between the outcomes of the burglaries (men armed and trained to kill, by His Majesty’s government, in defence of the nation) and the blackmail (some well-to-do shirkers who have avoided the conflict altogether) are deftly drawn, as both crimes stem from the aftermath of war and a worldwide pandemic, and both escalate into multiple deaths. These two crimes are punctuated by a large group of well-organised female shoplifters descending on Leeds.
This last in Nickson’s Tom Harper series, set in 1920, is a straightforward police procedural, as are the other books, but beneath a multifaceted, deceptively simple drama lies a city reeling from ‘the worst war man had ever known.’ Thoughts on lost morality, the sheer waste of human life, the physical and mental scars, and post-war healing, give Rusted Souls an emotional depth which tenderly evokes a society desperate to find some new kind of normal. Nickson’s farewell to his characters is filled with nostalgia, which does not make this an ideal starting point. I wholeheartedly recommend the series but suggest delving into one or two of the earlier books first.
