07/31/2017 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. (Sept.)
A Casualty of War is another masterful work in this series, and I cannot recommend it enough.” — Bookreporter.com
“Todd’s meticulous research... illustrates the toll the war has taken on the battle-weary military as well as the nurses and doctors, the sacrifices of the residents, [and] the citizens’ valiant struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy. . . . . A vivid and personal look at WWI.” — SouthFlorida.com
“Intensely personal, as all great stories should be.” — Anne Perry, Internationally Bestselling Author
“Harsh period attitudes toward traumatic stress and the exhaustion of a long war add poignancy to Todd’s satisfying puzzle of identity and inheritance.” — Publishers Weekly
“A Casualty of War is [Charles] Todd’s strongest war book...” — Washington Times
“[Readers] will love the heroine for her courage and determination.” — Kirkus Reviews
“The latest Crawford mystery is rich in character and period detail, with a solidly constructed story that should keep readers immersed in the action.” — Booklist
“As always in this immensely satisfying series, Todd heightens the mystery by setting it within a war-shattered world of battered villages, barren farms and broken people.” — Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review on THE SHATTERED TREE
Praise for The Shattered Tree : “Admirable, courageous and occasionally reckless, Bess ranks among the best of fictional amateur sleuths. [Todd] again creates a thought-provoking novel that evokes the terrors and suspicions of war.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A superb whodunit—just when you think you have it figured out, Todd throws a curve—and a moving evocation of a world at war.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch
Todd’s meticulous research... illustrates the toll the war has taken on the battle-weary military as well as the nurses and doctors, the sacrifices of the residents, [and] the citizens’ valiant struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy. . . . . A vivid and personal look at WWI.
Intensely personal, as all great stories should be.
As always in this immensely satisfying series, Todd heightens the mystery by setting it within a war-shattered world of battered villages, barren farms and broken people.
A Casualty of War is another masterful work in this series, and I cannot recommend it enough.
A Casualty of War is [Charles] Todd’s strongest war book...
Praise for The Shattered Tree : “Admirable, courageous and occasionally reckless, Bess ranks among the best of fictional amateur sleuths. [Todd] again creates a thought-provoking novel that evokes the terrors and suspicions of war.
The latest Crawford mystery is rich in character and period detail, with a solidly constructed story that should keep readers immersed in the action.
The latest Crawford mystery is rich in character and period detail, with a solidly constructed story that should keep readers immersed in the action.
A superb whodunit—just when you think you have it figured out, Todd throws a curve—and a moving evocation of a world at war.
A superb whodunit—just when you think you have it figured out, Todd throws a curve—and a moving evocation of a world at war.
Richmond Times-Dispatch on An Impartial Witness
Narrator Rosalyn Landor carries this installment of the Nurse Bess Crawford series. When Sister Crawford nurses Captain Alan Travis, he tells her a disturbing story of having been shot by a member of his own unit. Landor deftly re-creates Travis's horrific story and the warm yet tough personality of Crawford. After the Armistice, Landor's tone becomes more deliberative as Crawford decides to investigate Travis's story. It's enjoyable to hear Simon Bradon assist her. Do we dare hope that he’ll pursue a romance with her in subsequent books? Landor's best creations are Mrs. Travis, a bitter, vocal woman whom Crawford questions, and Vicar Caldwell and his wife. The couple are on opposite sides of Crawford's investigation, a situation that adds further conflict to the story. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2017-08-08 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.