In early summer, 1917, Bess Crawford returns from the trenches in France with badly wounded patients, among them a severe burn victim who has a picture of his wife pinned to his tunic. Bess turns her patients over to a clinic in England and boards another train to London for her few hours of leave before returning to her nursing duties in France. She notices another woman in the crowd at the train station who seems greatly distressed while seeing off an officer who is about to board the train, and realizes it is the face in the photograph worn by the burn victim. How strange—especially when the unknown woman is murdered less than twenty-four hours later. Bess can’t seem to get the face and the burned husband out of her mind, and she somewhat unwillingly gets involved in tracing the woman’s movements, and discovering her identity, while trying to unravel the mystery of the murder.
This latest effort from the mother and son team of authors who are Charles Todd provides a well-handled historical mystery, centered on World War I, imbued with fog, the horrors of trench warfare, the rolling English countryside, and somewhat Edwardian sensibilities which Bess struggles against in her search for the solution and closure to this intriguing story. I hope this series goes on for a long time, although the war does end—Bess lets us explore and understand the historical period at the beginning of the twentieth century, which can seem as foreign as Pluto to a contemporary reader. Highly recommended!