Two Storm Wood: A Novel

by Philip Gray

Overview

Three months after the end of the Great War, a young woman sets out across the wastelands of the Western Front to learn the fate of the man she loved.

On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.

Captain Mackenzie is a survivor of the war, but still its prisoner. He cannot return home until his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint. Amy Vanneck’s fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. Defying convention, hardship, and impossible odds, she heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.

It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393541885
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	240,716
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Philip Gray, under the pseudonym of Patrick Lynch, is the coauthor of six thrillers that have sold over a million copies worldwide. He published, as Philip Sington, Zoia’s Gold, The Einstein Girl, and The Valley of Unknowing. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Set largely in northern France a few months after the end of WWI, this uneven historical from British author Gray (Zoia's Gold, writing as Philip Sington) follows an affluent English woman on a quest to find her fiancé, who went missing in action and is presumed dead. Amy Vanneck, who made a promise to choirmaster turned reluctant soldier Edward Haslam that she would bring him (or his body) home, travels to the trenches where Haslam was last seen in search of her lover. With British troops scouring the area attempting to identify the thousands of scattered corpses, Amy enters a virtual hell scape of death and destruction, where she discovers that her missing fiancé was somehow connected to the murders of 13 men, all Chinese laborers. Flashbacks to the war heighten the tension, and the mystery of Haslam's whereabouts remains tantalizingly unclear until the very end. But the central character—a sheltered woman who witnesses and experiences numerous atrocities alone—strains the boundaries of believability, as does the unnecessary closing twist. Thriller fans will be disappointed. Agent: Nicola Barr, Bent Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Immersive and eerily atmospheric, Gray's novel delivers vivid historic detail and gripping suspense."

Booklist (starred review) - Christine Tran

"One of the most evocative thrillers I’ve ever read.… Haunting, cinematic, and utterly gripping."

D. B. John

"Atmospheric and meticulously researched, Two Storm Wood sheds light on the horrors and the trauma that continued even after the Armistice. It is that most wonderful of creations—a novel that informs while keeping you on the edge of your seat."

Abir Mukherjee

"The world has been waiting for a worthy successor to Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong—now Philip Gray has delivered it."

David Young

"[R]efreshingly different…. Gray has crafted a historical thriller in which a gutsy heroine goes searching for answers on the empty battlefields of the Western Front…. [T]horoughly researched and tightly plotted. Amy's sleuth work — tracking down survivors, sifting testimonies, venturing underground and re-evaluating the man she loves — makes for absorbing reading.... A thought-provoking drama which routinely strikes a number of serious notes about man's inhumanity and the traumatic effects of conflict."

Star Tribune - Malcolm Forbes

"In this poignant, intricately plotted novel, Gray succeeds in entwining two powerful tales—a love story and a hate story—in a way that, right from the shocking start, is both convincing and enthralling."

Virginia Baily

"[A] splendidly realised historical thriller….its achievement lies in Gray’s finely worked portraits of the pity of war — those damaged by conflict and those who have to deal with its mind-altering consequences."

The Times - James Owen

2021-03-31
British author Gray lays bare the horrors of World War I through an Englishwoman’s battlefield search for her fiance.

Before the war, music teacher Edward Haslam and Amy Vanneck fall in love and become secretly engaged, although he is beneath her class, socially a nobody. He hates war, which “poisons everything that it does not destroy,” yet he answers England’s call and becomes a captain of the Seventh Manchesters. Of course, the lovers exchange letters. Then, in early 1919, when the war is newly over, English soldiers must scour the battlefields of northern France to identify rat-eaten corpses and properly bury them. It’s a gruesome, smelly, necessary task. Edward is among the missing, and Amy decides to travel to France to search for him on her own, well aware that he is most likely dead. In a hospital, a wounded soldier tells her to “look for your damned sweetheart” under Two Storm Wood. That’s the label on army maps for a former German stronghold, under which lies a vast network of tunnels packed with explosives and teeming with rats. The army dismisses rumors that deserters are hiding there and that someone may have murdered a group of noncombatant Chinese laborers. There’s no hint of irony here: only horror at the possibility of murder while surrounded by nations’ organized killings. Amy is determined to know Edward’s fate for better or worse. This, to her, is what it means to be in love—to find her man dead or alive, deserter or not. But there are those who don’t want her to know a dark secret about Two Storm Wood, and they are willing to kill. Combat creates Edward's dramatic arc from “the lover, the music teacher” to “the expert close-quarter killer” who sneaks up to enemy trenches and slits throats with a knuckle knife. The scenes of death are unsparing in their grimness, but nothing will stop Amy Vanneck.

Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity. Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity.

Kirkus Reviews