A Casualty of War

July 31, 2017
Set in the fall of 1918, bestseller Todd’s strong ninth Bess Crawford mystery (after 2016’s The Shattered Tree) finds the British military nurse still in France, where she meets Capt. Alan Travis, whose English great-grandfather immigrated to Barbados after a family dispute. She reencounters him when he arrives in her field hospital suffering from gunshot wounds. His wild claims that he was deliberately shot by Lt. James Travis—a cousin he met just once—are implausible, and he’s forcibly restrained in a British clinic for mentally impaired soldiers. Bess, who trusts his sanity, promises to help him if she can. In England on leave after the Armistice, she travels to the Suffolk village near where the Travis family lives. The hostility of James’s mother and the murder of a stranger carrying stolen papers about Alan’s whereabouts convince Bess that his family connections put the captain at risk. Harsh period attitudes toward traumatic stress and the exhaustion of a long war add poignancy to Todd’s satisfying puzzle of identity and inheritance. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency.

August 15, 2017
In the aftermath of World War I, a surgical nurse tries to help a wounded officer who insists his cousin tried to kill him.As the Great War is winding down, Bess Crawford, a member of Queen Alexandra's army nursing corps, meets handsome Capt. Alan Travis at a hospital in France. Travis, who grew up in Barbados, is from a cadet branch of a wealthy Suffolk family, and he's passing through on his way to rejoin his men as they fight the retreating enemy. Shortly after Bess is transferred to a forward aid station, she encounters Travis again, this time as a patient who claims he got his head wound from a fellow officer who looks like his own great-uncle. Bess means to help when she asks if any cousins in Travis' generation have the same look, and Travis immediately thinks of his cousin James, whom he'd met briefly a year ago. Travis' wound is minor enough that he returns to the front and is shot again--again, he says, by James. Bess feels responsible for making Travis think of his cousin, especially when she learns the captain's been sent back to an English clinic for head-wound patients and is considered hopelessly insane. No one believes his obsession with James, who, it seems, was actually killed in battle a year earlier. As Travis' only advocates, Bess and Sgt. Maj. Simon Brandon, her trusted family friend, travel to the ancestral Travis home and into a tangle of contested wills, imposter claimants, and a murder charge that ensnares Capt. Travis, who arrives after escaping from his clinic, and even Bess herself. In their ninth installment (The Shattered Tree, 2016, etc.), the authors writing as Todd move from a poignant description of Armistice Day--when soldiers drop to their knees at the sudden cessation of gunfire--to one soldier's plight back in England. Although the action includes a couple of perilous scenes too many, readers will love the heroine for her courage and determination.

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August 1, 2017
It's 1918. The Great War is finally drawing to a close, and battlefield nurse Bess Crawford is looking forward to resuming her civilian life. But she still has her duties to perform, and one of them is tending to a wounded soldier who's suffering from a head wound that, he says, was inflicted on him by his own cousin. The man returns to duty, but then he reappears at Bess' aid station with another wound, which he claims was also inflicted by his cousin, who he says is trying to kill him. The doctors and other nurses believe the soldier is delusional, but Bess isn't so sure (although when she finds out the allegedly murderous cousin died a year ago, she's truly puzzled). The latest Crawford mystery is rich in character and period detail, with a solidly constructed story that should keep readers immersed in the action.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)