Customer Reviews

A Duty to the Dead

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book. The setting is interesting, the characters have depth, and the mystery is complex enough to make a reader think, without being convoluted or confusing. Best of all, the writing is exceptional. I was hooked after only a few pages.

I'm sure comparisons will be made between Bess Crawford and Maisie Dobbs since both worked as nurses during WW1 and are independent, intelligent, and compassionate women sleuths. However, Bess is not an imitation of Maisie. Their backgrounds, personalities, and investigative styles are quite different.

I hesitate to give much of a plot summary, because I don't want to spoil anything for other readers. I was lucky enough to pick up this book without any information beyond the very basic back cover blurb, and I really enjoyed reading without any previous knowledge of where the story was going. (Even the Publishers Weekly review gives away just a bit too much, in my opinion.) So, to give only the most basic outline - the story opens on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean, where Bess works as a nurse. We learn that she was entrusted with a message to deliver to a (dead) soldier's family. The message and its reception leave Bess with an unsettled feeling and the mystery begins to unfold, complicated by the very unusual family dynamics of her hosts in Kent.

"A Duty to the Dead" is a definite original and a great read. The only possible downside that I can imagine is that you will have trouble putting it down until you have reached the end.

Bess Crawford, daughter of a British Army officer and a nurse serving aboard the hospital ship Britannic, is invalided home after the ship is torpedoed and her arm is broken. This gives her the chance to fulfill a soldier's dying wish; Arthur Graham's cryptic deathbed message is to be delivered directly--no letters will do--to his brother Jonathan: "Tell Jonathan I lied. I did it for Mother's sake. But it has to be set right." Bess' letter to the family results in an invitation to the Graham home, but to her surprise, there is no reaction when she delivers the message. Jonathan and Mrs. Graham even question if Arthur was in pain or drugged when he said it. But the longer Bess remains in the Graham home, the more questions begin to arise: what did the message mean and why was it so important to Arthur but not to his family? How did Arthur's oldest brother Peregrine become confined to an insane asylum when he was only fourteen? And when Bess is called on to nurse Peregrine through a bout of pneumonia, why isn't he the dimwitted man he has been described to be?

I really enjoyed reading this book and finished it in one long session. I have recently read similar books taking place during or concerning nursing sisters of WWI (Anne Perry's WWI mysteries, the Maisie Dobbs stories, GIFTS OF WAR) and I liked this the most except for the Maisie Dobbs novels. Bess is one of the strong women that emerged at the time of the war, no longer willing to be treated as sweet flowers who were rewards to men. If I have one quibble with the book it is that I would have liked more descriptions of Bess and of some of the supporting characters, but perhaps the author did so on purpose so we could imagine Bess as we wanted her to be. Also, a certain amount of coincidence creeps into the story: how convenient that someone should be sick just as Bess was visiting, or the fact that the minister so willingly offers Bess the late vicar's journals to read. However, these small things did nothing to deter my enjoyment of the novel. I will be interested to read more about this character.

"A Duty to the Dead," by New York Times bestselling author Charles Todd, presumably begins a new historical mystery series, starring Bess Crawford. So this will join Todd's popular, highly-thought of Inspector Ian Rutledge series, now at eleven books. (There is also one stand-alone.) Charles Todd sets "his" mysteries in Britain; "he" is, however, actually an American mother-son writing team. She lives in Delaware; he, in North Carolina.

It's 1916; independently minded Bess has been a nurse aboard the floating World War I hospital ship Britannic, sister ship to the famed Titanic of the watery North Atlantic end. She has agreed to verbally transmit a message from the dying, charming, Lieutenant Arthur Graham, for whom she feels more than she should, back to his upper-crust family back home in the U.K. The book is told in first person, from Bess's point of view, an interesting departure from the Rutledge books.

Unfortunately, this time out, the team's writing, while it does cover the appropriate ground, is flat, and they are unable to make their material come alive. They choose to open with a set piece, much as the infinitely greater British mystery author John LeCarre generally does: the well-known sinking of Britannic in Greek waters. However, LeCarre's set pieces can blow the socks off a reader, see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; whereas the Todd team just can't make Britannic's sinking particularly vivid, and that's quite a failing. Perhaps actual World War I combat is a bit much for the Todd duo to handle. The book also, oddly enough, in several regards, strongly echoes a better historical mystery by Anne Perry, The Face of a Stranger: The First William Monk Novel (Mortalis).

The North Carolina-based son that's half of Charles Todd once spoke at a Wilmington Library Mystery Weekend. He was intelligent, charming, entertaining, and quite presentable: I wish him better luck next outing.

My first experience with the mother and son co-writing team known as Charles Todd came about when the Amazon Vine Program gave me the opportunity to read A Matter of Justice: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries) back in December of 2008. I was well and truly hooked and have been buying and reading Inspector Rutledge mysteries ever since. When I saw that this book began a series with a new lead character I simply had to read it.

Bess Crawford is a British nurse aboard the hospital transport ship Britannic in 1916 when the ship hits a mine and sinks. Thankfully the ship was not carrying wounded on this portion of their journey or the loss of life would have been much higher. Bess sustains a broken arm made much more serious by assisting in the rescue of one of her fellow nurses. That, plus having to wait for some time to receive good medical treatment, made the break much more serious and therefore very slow to heal. Because she cannot return to duty quickly Bess decides that she can't put off any longer making good on the promise she had made on a previous voyage to Arthur Graham before he died. Arthur had requested that Bess personally deliver a message to one of his brothers at his home in the small village of Owlhurst in Kent. What follows is the story of Bess meeting Arthur's family and discovering that his half-brother has been locked away in an asylum because of a grisly murder he committed when he was 14 years old. The more people Bess meets the more unsure she becomes about exactly what Arthur Graham's message meant and whether his brother Jonathan intends to do anything about Arthur's request.

I told a friend today that I absolutely devoured this book and that is the best way for me to describe it. The descriptions of the settings aboard ship, during the rescue, and then in both London and Kent are first rate, making it very obvious that these authors spent time in both of those locations absorbing the atmosphere. The characters are all very well developed, from Bess right down to her landlady. The plotting and pacing of the book move along at a very steady, sure speed so that I was completely involved in the story almost before I realized it. And I sincerely resented anything which came between me and reading this book. Bess Crawford is well portrayed as a woman of 1916, a woman willing to take her place in society to do her very best to help along the war effort. She was a very enjoyable character for me to read about, using her intellect to reason her way through the problems she was facing, trying to make sense of events which had happened so many years before but which still effected so many lives. Bess is a very strong character but the authors have resisted the temptation to turn her into a "modern" woman. I can see that there are all sorts of possible stories in this character's future and I'm ready to be right there with her. A very well written, exciting book.

As a huge fan of the Inspector Rutledge mysteries, I greeted this new series with a female protagonist set a couple of years before the start of Charles Todd's (as you probably know, a mother/son pair of co-authors) first books, putting it in the middle of the WWI years.Seeing those years through an independent woman's eyes is refreshing. Mind you, Bess is a resourceful and intelligent lady, an army nurse on medical leave after the sinking of the hospital ship she was on. During this leave, she decides to fulfil her promise to a dying soldier to deliver a message to his brother. However, the delivery of the message results in reviving an old murder murder case and the escape of an older brother who was the convicted suspect from a mental institution further stirs things up.The story does seem to falter a bit during the last half of the book, but it does build to an exciting climax.This should please the Iam Rutledge fans and also introduce the author to a new audience.

I read tons of "British" mysteries, and I found the setting of this one original and interesting: WWI, female nurses serving, hospital ships, the effect of that particular war with its particular horrors on both military and civilian citizens, etc. The plot idea was interesting (don't need to repeat it here) also, if somewhat unbelievable.

[SPOILER] Maybe I read too many mysteries, but the repetitive mentioning of the tutor's pegging of Peregrine as learning disabled made it obvious that the tutor would figure largely somehow in the end, which he did. Bess's aunt insisting that Bess re-interview the tutor and Bess doing it seemed so contrived: the author(s) needed Bess to be there in that distinctive car with the distintive driver. Since the tutor had been such a poor interview subject the first time there was absolutely no reason for Bess to talk to him again, except as a device to put her in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[SPOILER] What gave me the biggest problem was Peregrine's ability, by the end of the story, to intereact relatively normally as an adult. It seems to me that a man who was emotionally abused for most of his childhood, betrayed by his family, drugged, and locked away in an asylum for many years would be totally screwed up even after escaping those horrors. I can't believe he could learn to trust any person in that short amount of time. The only hint we have of the effect of all of this is that he didn't know about the structure in Brighton, and then his one bout of losing it very briefly when exposed to goose entrails.

[SPOILER] The gory scene in the field near the end of the book seemed too easy. Just have everyone shoot everyone else (kind of like the OK Corral). Actually, by this time, I found the three other brothers equally repugnant and didn't really care which of them was the real culprit. I knew all the time that Pregrine didn't do it.

So, 3 stars for me. However, based on the other reviews I've read of this one, I'll probably check out other books by this author(s), even though I am leery of co-authorship of fiction (after reading many of increasingly ghastly Perri O'Shaughnessy books, and suffering through Larry McMurtry's experiments with Diana Ossana).

The American mother-son team that writes under the name Charles Todd is hugely adept at creating interesting, multifaceted characters in tune with their time and equally adept at recreating that time, the World War I era in England, which is the setting for both their Inspector Ian Rutledge series, now in its 12th installment, and this new one starring Bess Crawford, the army nurse.

That they also can be counted on to deliver lots of story for the money is both a strength and a weakness. Often those stories are so intricately plotted that it seems the only way to make them work is with heavy helpings of too-convenient coincidences. This caused me some suspension-of-disbelief problems with their most recent Rutledge outing and, for awhile at least, seemed to also infect this one.

For example, after her dramatic introduction aboard a sinking hospital ship (the Brittanic, sister of the Titanic), our heroine soon finds herself back in England visiting the family of a soldier to whom she'd made a deathbed promise to deliver a message to one of his brothers. Message delivered, but concerned about the way it was received and reluctant to go, but clearly having worn out her welcome, she's about to depart when suddenly there's an urgent need for a nurse who understands shell shock, so she stays on, picking up some disturbing clues along the way; that accomplished, she's about to depart again when there's yet another urgent need for a nurse, so she stays on yet again and picks up more disturbing clues; that accomplished, she's about to depart yet again, whence comes a death and a request that she stay until the inquest, which brings on still more clues; inquest testimony given, she at last heads home only to find that the Owlhurst mystery has followed her home and in a most frightening way.

At that point, I'm no longer sure whether I just got so involved that I shrugged off further too-convenient coincidences or whether the need for too-convenient coincidences disappeared once sufficient information was divulged and the mystery and Bess's involvement in it could be set in motion. Either way, once we get past all that, the mystery really takes off and we're in for quite a ride through an ever twisting, turning, tense, dense and well populated plot that keeps us riveted right down to its pull-out-all-the-stops ending.

I can't wait for the next installment.

I am not sure why I keep picking up books that take place during World War I, but I do. Part of me must be looking for the fascination that other find with these books, but I am just lost - I am still looking for that gem that will make it all come together for me, I just have not come across it yet. Not to say that authors like the writing team of Charles Todd do not do a wonderful job in describing the influences and the people, but for me this historical period offers no spark or appeal.

England 1916 and Bess Crawford, an army nurse, is traveling on the Britannic when it hits a mine and is sunk. Bess carries with her a message from Lt. Arthur Graham, a soldier that she met and became close to several months prior. When she is in England, she must set out to find his family, deliver a message and set things right. Little does she know that she is about to become embroiled in a family full of secrets and lies.

The Graham family is quite peculiar, brothers divided and favorites are chosen. When Arthur knew he was dying he needed to set the past right - a past that would lead Bess Crawford down a dangerous path where she had to break through old stereotypes and fight for a brother that the others had abandoned.

As I said before, this book would be very good for someone that is drawn to this timeframe. An era where people and places were much simpler - not to say that people were not evil, they just were taken at face value and evil deeds were shocking.

I do not think that this is the right series for me. So, in my own misguided way, I will continue to stumble along in this journey until something sparks my curiosity.

My choice of Amazon's "A Duty to the Dead" was a good one. It features the Charles Todd duo's new detective, Bess Crawford. Bess is a nurse serving in France during World War One. She sees the real war not the one trumpeted in the British newspapers, she sees the agony of the wounded who embarked on the fight thinking to gain glory. Bess is drawn to one of the severely wounded men, Arthur, who asks her to deliver an important message to his brother. She is given leave on occasion to go home to London to get away from the fighting and she carries out the promise she made to Arthur. She encounters a puzzling response to her message and being a nosy sort, asks questions here and there and uncovers a tangled story of betrayal.

There is the usual cast of characters who add to and enhance the story; real believable characters one finds in the well done British mysteries.

I loved this book and couldn't put it down. The Todd duo has written their usual high quality work. It seems historically accurate (I'm not an expert on English history) , it's gripping, fascinating, puzzling - everything I want in mystery. I am already reading the second in the series "An Impartial Witness" and am enjoying it thoroughly.

"A Duty to the Dead", the first volume in the Bess Crawford mystery series by Charles Todd, starts off explosively ... literally! ... as the English nurse is introduced as one of the passengers on board Titanic's sister ship, the Britannic, when the latter sinks while in hospital service during World War I. Injured during the tragedy, Bess uses her leave to deliver a cryptic final message to the family of a soldier she had cared for, but who failed to survive his war wounds: "Tell Jonathan I lied. I did it for Mother's sake. But it has to be set right." Little does Bess know that in passing along the dead man's final words, she will reset into motion a long-dormant chain of murder and injustice that began years earlier and that has already engulfed an entire town and destroyed many individuals' lives ... including branches of the deceased soldier's diseased and twisted family tree.

Author Todd (actually the mother and son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) have a gift for developing intricate and suspenseful plots; and yet they are also masters are creating full-bodied characters in historical settings. Their previous work on the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, also set in England during World War I and its aftermath, has already earned them a legion of enthusiastic fans who admire the authors' ability to build up layers of mystery and then resolve all the questions during a tense and action-filled climax. Happily, "A Duty to the Dead" measures up to the high standards this ingenuous team has already set. Based on their skill in bringing Bess Crawford to life in this fledgling effort - and its sequel, "An Impartial Witness" - I can only believe that this new series will bring them new laurels. And deservedly so!