A Casualty of War: A Bess Crawford Mystery: Bess Crawford Mysteries, cartea 9

Though the Great War is nearing its end, the fighting still rages on. Waiting for her transport north, nurse Bess Crawford meets Captain Alan Travis, an Englishman whose branch of the Travis family made its fortune on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Then, at the beginning of November, Captain Travis is brought into Bess’s forward aid station disoriented from a head wound. He insists that the man who shot him was an English officer—a distant cousin named James Travis—and asks for Bess’s help finding him. Her inquiries in the captain’s sector about James lead nowhere. Days later, the captain is severely wounded, and again he accuses James of shooting him. But Bess has been told that James couldn’t possibly have shot his cousin, which brings Alan Travis’s sanity into question.
As the war comes to a bloody end, Bess is given leave, and in an English clinic for brain injuries, she discovers a suicidal Captain Travis strapped to his bed. Horrified by his condition, she and Sergeant-Major Simon Brandon travel to James Travis’s home in Suffolk to learn more about the baffling relationship between these two cousins. Her search for the truth about Alan Travis will lead Bess into unexpected danger—and bring her face-to-face with the visible and invisible wounds of war that not even the much-longed-for peace can heal.

“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