Bess, Bess . . . What a messy situation you've managed to get yourself into! And how lucky for you that you manage to get yourself out (maybe with a little help from friends), iron over those wrinkles and then get back to your war work relatively unscathed. This isn't just a nasty little scrape. It's murder we're talking about. And worse, you've managed to become a suspect no less. Bess Crawford is who I am talking about. It's been a while (three years almost to the day actually) since I have shared any adventures with Bess Crawford. In the interim of those three years she's managed to have at least four more adventures of the mystery persuasion without me and now I have an awful lot of catching up to do.
I've had to reacquaint myself with Bess Crawford and her family and her last mystery, An Impartial Witness. This is one reason I like writing about the books I read (so I can go back and refresh my memory if need be about a story). Pity I didn't (and I won't here either) share the resolution to the mystery. It was solved but so much time has passed now, 'how' and 'who' completely elude me. If you like Maisie Dobbs, you might well like Bess Crawford, but the two women and their situations and where the stories are moving are very different. Bess is a WWI nurse, and the mysteries she gets involved in are a matter of timing and a desire to uncover truths and leave life tidier than what it was before. Like Maisie she is a good person, a caring person, but these mysteries written by mother-son team, Charles Todd, are set firmly during the war years and Bess is an amateur with good connections. Maisie has moved on and the War is firmly in her past now.
In the third Bess Crawford mystery, A Bitter Truth, the year is 1917 and it is December just before Christmas. Bess has been given leave from France to return home to England and to her family in Somerset. Unfortunately she doesn't get any further than her flat in London which she shares with other nursing friends before she is caught up in domestic intrigue which will lead to murder. Bess dashes through the rainy, cold streets of London and is ready to unlock her door when she comes across a well-dressed young woman sheltering in her doorway. The woman is not dressed for the cold December weather, is obviously and tearfully upset and has a bruised face. Of course it is in Bess's nature to come to the aid of people who have been hurt, so she manages to convince the woman to come up to her flat to dry off and get warm.
The woman is at first secretive and not forthcoming about how she came by the bruise, her name or how she ended up in Bess's doorway. Bess has a gentle nature and without prying, yet I suppose she is prying, she manages to inveigle a bit of information from the battered woman, obviously a Lady and of some means. Lydia had an argument with her husband in Suffolk and when he slapped her she ran from the house and in a desire to get as far away as possible, took the first train out and ended up in London. But with no money, inappropriately dressed and completely friendless. Although Bess is due to return to her own family for the holidays she agrees to accompany Lydia back to her husband's estate. The idea being that a 'friend', which is how the two decide to portray the situation even though they had never met before, would help ease Lydia back into the family without a lot of embarrassing questions.
Lydia isn't exactly forthcoming about her situation, and by the time that Bess understands the family dynamics a murder has been committed. Lydia is the wife of a soldier and the heir to a grand estate. She wants a child, but her husband doesn't and the argument between the two resulted in Lydia's mad dash to London. Every family has secrets, but this one has a bounty of them. An angry husband, a kind mother-in-law and a very imperious and snobby grandmama means Bess gets stuck in a situation that turns from bad to worse. There is a dead child, the sister of Roger Ellis, Lydia's husband, and the hint of another child (the result of an impropriety) back in France.
The story moves back and forth between England and France. Let's just say that Bess agrees to something she really shouldn't, getting more and more involved in the Ellis family than is good for anyone. She does get a little help from a family friend, Simon Brandon, who was her father's batman in India. The Colonel (Bess and her mother affectionately-and behind his back-call him the Colonel Sahib) may be retired but he is called on to act as an adviser at times and Simon is dedicated to Bess's family and looks after her in a brotherly (?-I'm not entirely sure what their actual relationship is yet-or what it might turn into) manner.
All in all a very satisfying mystery, though how Bess manages to get into some of the situations she does and extricate herself so easily, as well as the decisions she makes without too many repercussions amaze me a little. But Bess is a very likable character and one who I plan on continuing to follow. Next up is An Unmarked Grave which deals with the Spanish Influenza that took so many lives during the war. I'd very much like to get back into the Ian Rutledge mysteries as well, which Todd writes. There are well over a dozen of those and I would have to start from the beginning again, but I think this is going to be a good mystery-reading year for me, so you never know what I might accomplish. My reading will likely be scattered all over the place, but I am hoping to read at least several books in a particular series before picking up something 'new'.