When World War I nurse Bess Crawford sees a woman sobbing in the arms of a British army officer at a railroad station, she recognizes her as the wife of Lt. Meriwether Evanson, a severely burned man she’s been treating. Evanson had been clutching his wife’s photo for weeks as he struggles to survive. Thinking that the woman was most likely having an affair with the officer, Bess is shocked and saddened. When she learns that the woman was murdered later that same day, she determines to become involved.
As her investigation proceeds—with the help of her father’s contacts in the military and Scotland Yard—several more people connected to the case are found dead, presumably by suicide, but Bess is convinced that they too were murdered by a very clever and determined killer. Before long, her own life hangs in the balance.
Because she has seen so much bloodshed and suffering as a battlefield nurse, Bess has a no-nonsense way of dealing with things and a tenacity that the reader comes to admire. Both of these traits are necessary to solve the case in this excellent mystery that touches upon the high psychological and emotional cost of war.
This is the second in a series, following A Duty to the Dead (2009) by the mother and son team Charles and Caroline Todd, who previously wrote 12 Ian Rutledge mysteries set in the same time period. Both of these series bring to life the era during and after the First World War in an entertaining way.