Bess Crawford enjoyed a wondrous childhood in India, where
her father, a colonel in the British army, was stationed on
the Northwest Frontier. But an unforgettable incident
darkened that happy time. In 1908, Colonel Crawford's
regiment discovered it had a murderer in its ranks, an
officer who killed five people in India and England yet was
never brought to trial.
In the eyes of many of these soldiers, men defined by honor
and duty, the crime was a stain on the regiment's
reputation, and on the good name of Bess' father, the
Colonel Sahib, who had trained the killer. A decade later,
tending to the wounded on the battlefields of France during
World War I, Bess learns from a dying Indian sergeant that
the supposed murderer, Lieutenant Wade, is alive-and serving
at the Front.
Bess cannot believe the shocking news. According to reliable
reports, Wade's body had been seen deep in the Khyber Pass,
where he died trying to reach Afghanistan. Soon, though, her
mind is racing. How did he escape from India? What drove a
good man to murder in cold blood? Curious to find answers,
she uses her leave to investigate. In the village where the
first three killings took place, she discovers that locals
are certain that the British soldier was innocent.
Yet the present owner of the house that was the scene of the
crime believes otherwise, and is convinced that Bess'
father helped Wade flee. To settle the matter once and for
all, Bess sets out to find Wade and let the courts decide.
But when she stumbles on the horrific truth, something that
even the famous writer Rudyard Kipling had kept secret all
his life, she is shaken to her very core. The facts will
damn Wade even as they reveal a brutal reality, a reality
that could have been her own fate.
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