The Second World War is over but its repercussions persist, damaging lives, making headlines. The former war reporter Billie Walker, in the second of this hard-hitting series, THE GHOSTS OF PARIS, leaves her Sydney, Australia office to search for a client’s missing husband in Europe – and reawakens some of her personal ghosts.
Vera Montgomery, a new client of Billie’s private investigation office, engages the firm to find her absent husband. Mr Montgomery was last seen in Paris, arranging an exhibition designed to restart business exchanges. Without income or clear status, this lady is tired of waiting and wants a divorce or proof of death. Billie is in the same position. She’s perhaps an abandoned wife, perhaps a war widow. Jack Rake, a photojournalist, and Billie got married while they were documenting the horrendous circumstances in 1944 Poland. People were disappearing all over Europe, and journalists were no safer. With a paying client, Billie and her dependable assistant Sam Baker can use the journey to check on Jack’s last known whereabouts.
There’s plenty of interest. Billie is obviously in an advanced position for women of her day, and if she wasn’t running the firm, she’d have been obliged to step aside for men returning from service. She gives us a look at how life was for women, whatever their degree of emancipation. This includes women she meets who prefer the company of women, and her Aboriginal assistant and friend, Shyla Davis, who takes charge of the office in her absence.
The Australian investigator also shows us an outsider’s view of postwar, scarred, London and Paris. These are reached via Qantas Lancastrian service - repurposed bombers with bare-bones comforts, many stops, and noisy flights. I had not read the prior book in which a Nazi war criminal on the run encountered Billie and Sam in Sydney, but that story echoes, trials and reporting being discussed. This may make the tale more distressing for some, than the events of this installment.
Author Tara Moss is an Australian and Canadian, who takes research seriously, to the degree of gaining a PI credential. She has gained accolades for her work in championing women and people with disabilities. While one character in THE GHOSTS OF PARIS has incurred a war disability, it never impinges on the action and adds to the realism. I certainly intend to read the first book and any more from the Billie Walker series.
It’s 1947. The world continues to grapple with the fallout of the Second World War, and former war reporter Billie Walker is finding her feet as an investigator. When a wealthy client hires Billie and her assistant Sam to track down her missing husband, the trail leads Billie back to London and Paris, where Billie’s own painful memories also lurk. Jack Rake, Billie's wartime lover and, briefly, husband, is just one of the millions of people who went missing in Europe during the war. What was his fate after they left Paris together?
As Billie's search for her client's husband takes her to both the swanky bars at Paris's famous Ritz hotel and to the dank basements of the infamous Paris morgue, she'll need to keep her gun at the ready, because something even more terrible than a few painful memories might be following her around the city of lights
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