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AN UNWILLING ACCOMPLICE
by Charles Todd
William Morrow, August 2014
352 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 0062237195


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I admit to being blown away by the sheer knowledge and attention to detail that Charles Todd has brought to the Bess Crawford mystery series. The setting of the English countryside during World War I comes alive in fact after fact: from the absence of adult males to carry on the agricultural work on family farms and estates because they've gone off to war, to the emotional toll on family after family trying to cope with the deaths of their loved ones or their disappearance or their return home permanently crippled by horrifying wounds. Further, there is careful attention given to the culture of the time and to the status of women, desperate to marry even overbearing men who will treat them as chattel: women whose property and inheritances will belong to their husbands from their wedding day on. The level of technology is also clearly drawn: the lack of refrigeration, the kind of life lived before electricity, the lack of plumbing and central heating, the common use of horses for transportation and even dog carts to transfer bundles.

Woven through all of this background are the circumstances under which doctors and nurses struggled to treat the hurt and dying: where does one operate on a badly wounded man when he is also dying of influenza because there is an epidemic raging through the trenches the English soldiers are living in; how does one try to prevent infection in wounds with only a rudimentary knowledge of pathogens and no knowledge of the necessity for sterilization of medical instruments? And psychologically there is the frightening disparity seen in soldiers' reactions to battlefront conditions and to their own injuries: many are desperate to be released from medical care in order to return to their assignments on the front lines and just as many are just as desperate to escape the terror and the pain by deserting and disappearing if they can. Again, I am in awe of the expertise with which Charles Todd draws for us this setting of one hundred years ago.

I will also admit to being new to the series, having read none of the five preceding novels. That, I think, may have put me at a disadvantage in finding a way to relate to the protagonist, Bess. I found the other characters, both central and periphal, easy to accept for the most part. Presented as a skilled surgical nursing sister, deeply concerned with the welfare of her patients (and of every single one of them, not just the heroes or those somehow deserving of her concern), her failure to question elements in the mystery seem out of character. How did 1) Sergeant Wilkins, her patient, manage to get out of the hotel when his wounds confined him to a wheelchair, 2) how did he get to Ironbridge and manage to murder another soldier by hanging him from the famous bridge when so seriously wounded, and 3) how he has managed to elude pursuit by local constabulary, Scotland Yard, and the Army? She never seems to ask.

One, early in the novel, that Bess, warned to remain where she is because heading out into the countryside will only make her look as though she is trying to join Sergeant Wilkins, heads out into the countryside to satisfy her own curiosity. She explains herself:

"But, Simon, what else was I to do? I couldn't sit idly, waiting for what was to come. And I needed to understand . . .'"

Nearly the end of the novel, her behavior and motivation unswervingly the same:

"‘I know you told me to stay by the motorcar, but I wanted to know, Simon.'"

My problem with Bess is that she does not appear to care whether Sergeant Wilkins commits more murders, if indeed he committed the first one, nor even that she is continually and deliberately damaging her own reputation even though clearing "my name and reputation" is the motivation that the author frequently attributes to her. She behaves, sadly, as do those whom we disparage one hundred years after her time as being addicted to their own personal and instant gratification.

There is a much smaller, but repeated, flaw in that Simon and Bess believe that they can sneak up on persons on foot they are trying to follow in their motorcar by turning off the headlamps. I would not try that in my present-day SUV, and I promise that it is light years quieter when running that anything Simon and Bess could have been using. Perhaps the English of 1914 were all as deaf as posts.

Finally, the mystery is not so much a mystery as a convoluted and unlikely contrivance, often nearly impossible to follow, and that is disappointing.

On the other hand, the immense gifts that Charles Todd displays in these period mystery novels and the earlier and continuing series featuring Ian Rutledge, have earned them a large and devoted following. I feel sure that AN UNWILLING ACCOMPLICE will be well and eagerly received.

§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.

Reviewed by Diana Borse, August 2014

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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