From the Publisher
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
SouthFlorida.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.
Anne Perry
Intensely personal, as all great stories should be.
Marilyn Stasio
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.
Bookreporter.com
A Casualty of War is another masterful work in this series, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Washington Times
A Casualty of War is [Charles] Todd’s strongest war book...
Richmond Times-Dispatch
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.
Booklist
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
The latest Crawford mystery is rich in character and period detail, with a solidly constructed story that should keep readers immersed in the action.
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 on An Impartial Witness
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
