World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford goes to
dangerous lengths to investigate a wounded soldier’s
background—and uncover his true loyalties—in this thrilling
and atmospheric entry in the bestselling “vivid period
mystery series” (New York Times Book Review).
At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire,
stretcher-bearers find an exhausted officer, shivering with
cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is
brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station,
where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he
is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is, the officer
isn’t British—he’s French. But in a moment of anger and
stress, he shouts at Bess in German.
When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior
offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from
Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous
border between France and Germany has continually shifted
through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian?
And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies
really lie?
Of course, Matron could be right, but Bess remains
uneasy—and unconvinced. If he was a French soldier, what was
he doing so far from his own lines . . . and so close to
where the Germans are putting up a fierce, last-ditch fight?
When the French officer disappears in Paris, it’s up to
Bess—a soldier’s daughter as well as a nurse—to find out
why, even at the risk of her own life.
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