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So, was it worth the wait?

I'm talking about the five frustrating years Rennie Airth fans have had to wait for this third volume in his superb, but all-too-brief, trilogy of mysteries featuring John Madden.

For the uninitiated, who is Rennie Airth? Why, merely the best detective-fiction novelist you've never heard of.

Not that it matters, but you won't know whether Rennie Airth is a man or a woman. Man. He's South African, was a correspondent for Reuters, lives in Italy and The Dead of Winter is his fifth novel, but only his third mystery in 10 years. That's a glacial pace for a mystery novelist, the expectation being more like one a year, or even a delivery every nine months or so. That's the way you keep up enthusiasm among your followers.

• The Dead of Winter, by Rennie Airth, Penguin Canada, 409 pages, $24

But Airth does have his followers and they've been champing at the bit in anticipation of this one. Here's why.

It was the first Madden, River of Darkness, that made of me an instant convert.

When that novel appeared, in 1999, neither I, nor our redoubtable crime fiction columnist, Margaret Cannon, had so much as heard of Airth. Yet that work hit me (her too) like a slap on the head in a dark alley. And it remains one of the finest detective novels I've ever read. It introduces Detective Inspector John Madden (think Roderick Alleyn and Adam Dalgleish) in a post-First World War Britain. Madden, carrying the ghosts of the war, is confronted with the utterly chilling slaughter of an entire household by a complex and unique villain. The characterization, the plot, the psychological complexity, the setting, the powerful sense of foreboding made the book an out-of-nowhere stunner. It should have won every prize going.

“ The plot is chilling, and even moving, the characters fleshed and deeply felt, and Airth retains his remarkable ability to evoke time and place”

Five years later – you begin to see the pattern – Airth followed it up with the second Madden. The Blood-Dimmed Tide is set in 1932. Madden, still in shock after his experience in the trenches and the murders of the first book, has retired from Scotland Yard and married Helen, a doctor he met in River , and become a country farmer.

Still, the bucolic life is illusory, or only partly possible. A search for a child-killer leads Madden, now accompanying his Yard mates we met in the first novel, into another series of terrible crimes. The somewhat inconclusive ending leads us to expect that the third in the Madden trilogy will also take place in wartime.

And it does. The Dead of Winter (a clever, multi-layered title, that) takes place in London in late 1944, the last winter of the Second World War. A young Polish-Jewish refugee whose family has all been killed by the Nazis is murdered near the British Museum. Turns out she had been working for the Maddens, who had taken a liking to her. Madden, quietly infuriated as much by the unbearable heaviness of evil as by the murder of Rosa Novak (which evokes the earlier death of one of his own children), takes an interest in the case. Anyone who's read the earlier Airths will expect further complications, further bloodshed. And will get it. But no spoilers here.

As in the earlier novels, Madden's world includes those on the side of the angels: Angus Sinclair, who himself should be retired but who has stayed on for the war, and Billy Styles. Owing to the setting, and to Madden's character, there is a Golden Age feel to the Airth novels, but there's a large difference: the terrible emotional scarring suffered by those who look regularly into the face of evil.

If The Dead of Winter does not quite rise to the level of River of Darkness, that's only because the bar was set so very high in the earlier work.

This is still detective fiction of a very high order. The plot is chilling, and even moving, the characters fleshed and deeply felt, and Airth retains his remarkable ability to evoke time and place. His late-wartime England is tired, tired, tired of war, tired of its slaughter and its privations. The land of hope and glory is also a land of rationing, dark and blasted streets, petty and not-so-petty crime, overcrowding, blighted lives and the general stench of humanity. As always, there's a deeply compassionate element to Airth's rendering of this world.

Opening The Dead of Winter after a the long wait, I thought: This had better be good.

And it is. Not River of Darkness good (what is?), but very good indeed. Rennie Airth is in his 70s now, but I hope we have not seen the last of the unforgettable John Madden.

Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail.