When I saw the Book Dilettante review of the new Charles Todd Bess Crawford mystery, I rushed right out to get a copy. I thought the previous one, An Impartial Witness, was very engaging and that the World War I backdrop was well portrayed.
A Bitter Truth is based on a somewhat ridiculous premise, at least in my opinion. In the first pages, Bess returns from nursing in France to find a woman who’s obviously been hit in the face, hiding in her doorway from a cold Christmas time rain. I can believe that Bess would take her in for the night, no questions asked. But then she ends up escorting Lydia back to her home in Sussex and staying with a family she knows nothing about when her own family is waiting for her to get home for Christmas. I’d find it more believable if it had been someone she’d known at school or hadn’t seen in years or something like that, but complete strangers, during the holiday season, on a brief furlough from war?
At any rate, if you can just forget about that, the mystery is a good one. Following an awkward family dinner, when a longtime friend appears to accuse Lydia’s husband of having an illegitimate child back in France, the friend is found murdered near the churchyard. The police suspect it must have been someone in the Ellis family, but being the outsider Bess falls under suspicion, too. She tries to figure out what’s going on, and once back in France she tries to find the mystery child as well.
Although both of the Bess Crawford mysteries I’ve read seem to ignore the fact of gasoline rationing (I lost count of the number of often lengthy automobile trips Bess and her family and the Ellis family took), in general I thought the book reflected some of the issues of World War I rather well: what people thought of nursing sisters, for instance, or the problems of orphans in France. This sort of detail provides an interesting historical backdrop for the mystery.
Even more than the mystery, though, I liked Bess as a character — she’s tough while remaining compassionate, she makes mistakes sometimes and regrets her actions, she does the best she can. When does Bess #4 come out?
Book #10 in the Strong Heroine Reading Challenge
