Customer Reviews

An Impartial Witness: A Bess Crawford Mystery

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sometimes, if you interrupt me while I'm reading a book to ask how I like it, I'll respond, "Oh, it's good," in a quiet sort of 4-star way. But then I'll tell you to shut up because I'm busy reading. And then I stay up late, way past my bed-time, to finish the book. I realize only after I'm done that this is a 5-star book. That pretty well describes my response to An Impartial Witness. It's really, really good, but not in a manner to make me shout aloud.

The back cover suggests that this book will appeal to those who like Jacqueline Winspear's novels -- and I can see why. In both cases, the protagonist is a World War I nurse who gets involved in solving a mystery. Winspear's heroine is (or rather becomes) a professional detective, though. This Bess Crawford novel would be considered a "cozy mystery" but for the historical setting.

Bess has nursed an aircraft pilot for quite a while after he was severely burned in France; the man held onto a photo of his wife to give him hope. Right after delivering the pilot to longer-term care back in England, Bess sees the wife crying all over a serviceman at the train station. The woman is distraught enough that Bess runs after her, to no avail. But soon thereafter, she learns that the pilot's wife was murdered that night. Thus she becomes involved in finding out who did it...

The mystery is a good one (though I confess I solved some of the plot points before Bess did) and obviously, given my sleepiness this morning, held my interest all the way through. But what makes this book so enjoyable is the writing style (which is gentle, even when describing a war scene), entirely plausible characters (even the obnoxious ones), and the historical detail that brings the era to life. From an upper-class woman fretting about finding chickens to serve dinner guests to the despair and loneliness of relatives worried about the fate of their soldiers, I got a clear picture of day-to-day life in 1917.

I really enjoyed this book. I think you will, too.

I gave the first book in this series, "A Duty to the Dead" a 5-star review. I loved that book and thought it was one of the best mysteries I had read in a long time. It was the perfect balance of atmosphere, mystery and character. I was eager to read this one when it was published and grabbed it quickly. To be blunt, I was fairly disappointed.

The novel's main character is Bess Crawford, a British nurse serving in France during World War I. Bess finds herself caring for a badly burned pilot and ends up attending to him during the transport back to England. His injuries are severe but he hangs on to the will to live due to his intense love for his wife - the desire to be with her again keeps him alive. Upon arrival back in England, Bess is convinced she sees his wife with another man at the train station and the book is off and running from there.

While I enjoyed the previous book immensely, this one didn't work for me. 1) There were WAY too many coincidences to be anywhere near believable. 2) The main character of Bess became irritating to me after a while (she regularly reminds the reader how brilliant she is because she trained as a nurse, she often takes offense to the way people treat her since she has all this intellectual power, and her over-developed since of responsibility was grating). The mystery itself drug along to the point I no longer cared about the person(s) who died and who killed them. I pretty much just wanted it to be over but kept reading since I knew the first one had been so good that I thought it would pick up.

I am sad to report that a wonderful debut was followed up with a book that was less that satisfying. The sense of place, strong female role and interesting mystery of the first novel were replaced by something that left me disappointed at best. My high hopes were dashed with this one.

As the reader has followed the adventures of Bess Crawford, a nurse on active duty during WWI, we see what a caring person she is. We also observe her curiosity and in this story, we witness her duty to the dead.

The action of this story begins with Bess helping escort a group of injured soldiers back to England from the French battlefields.

One of the members of the group is a badly burned pilot who keeps a photo of his wife on his chest as if it represents his hope and reason for living.

After delivering the patients to the English clinic, Bess is given leave. She notices a woman at a train station giving a tearful goodbye to a soldier heading for the front. When the woman turns toward Bess, Bess regognizes the woman from the photo. It's the wife of the injured pilot. Bess consider's the husband suffering in pain at the clinic while his wife spends time with another soldier. Bess considers how unfair this is.

When Bess returns from her leave and has a chance to read a local newspaper, she's shocked to learn that the woman has been murdered. Not only that but that the woman was three months pregnant while her husband had been at the front for four months. The sadness continues when Bess reads that the injured pilot managed to find a scapel and committed suicide after learning the news.

Bess feels that she was placed in this situation and wants to learn more. On her next leave back to England, she visits the woman, Marjorie Everson's, family and learns of the antagonism that Marjorie's sister, Victoria, had for her. She also meets Lt. Everson's sister, Serena Melton, and finds that she is claiming that her sister-in-law's death was just a robbery gone bad.

Bess's woman's intuition makes her believe that the answer in with the soldier that Marjorie was with at the train station. She contacts the authorites and begins to search for that soldier.

There are more twists and deaths in the story as Bess attempts to find the answers. This is described around the events of the war as Bess returns again to the front, to care for newly wounded soldiers and observe how insane the war is where there is a high cost of lives for only a few hundred yards gained and then lost in battle. The story was so realistic it was almost as if the reader could feel the amunition exploding, smell the gunsmoke and hear the moans of the injured.

This is the second in Todd's Bess Crawford series following "A Duty to the Dead." The book opens in 1917 with Bess accompanying a shipload of wounded soldiers back to England from the tenches in France. After turning her charges over to others, Bess sees a woman she knows, but only from the photograph pinned to one of her severely wounded patients. The woman is her patient's wife. Bess is shocked to see the woman in tears talking to a man who was obviously her lover. When the woman is later murdered, Bess reports what she has seen to the Scotland Yard detective in charge of the case.
When the husband commits suicide, Bess feels she must investigate the woman's murder instead of letting Scotland Yard conduct the investigation.
Todd has a rich cast of characters each met in his/her turn as Bess begins peeling back the layers of the dead woman's life to find out why she was murdered. The obvious suspects are eliminated one by one. In the end, Bess' life is in danger from the murderer.
This is not a fast-paced mystery. The reader is with Bess as she uncovers each piece of evidence and as she tries to puzzle out who killed the young woman and why. With each new piece of evidence, she gets closer to answering her own questions. Unbeknownst to either Bess or the reader, each piece of the puzzle as it slips into place, draws her ever closer to real danger. When the killer attempts to kill another young woman, a cousin of the first victim, Scotland Yard arrests a wounded soldier whom Bess has spent time with. Bess is convinced that he is innocent which, of course, only spurs her on. Bess is not omniscient, she believes the people she likes who often withhold key pieces of evidence.
As the case evolves, Bess narrows the suspects to two. Todd has you, like Bess, wanting one character to be the killer and in a twist, finding out it was another character who was the real killer.
Todd draws you into the book slowly but surely. Toward the end, when Bess is desperate to save the young man accused of the murder, you'll find yourself feeling the same urgency and will be unable to put the book down - regardless of the hour.
With each entry in this series, Bess becomes more fully fleshed out as a young woman dedicated to her patients on the front lines in France, a loving daughter, a caring friend, and someone you'd like to spend more time with.

I have read all of the Charles Todd mysteries, and have found some of the Rutledge books brilliantly constructed. I liked the first Bess Crawford book, so I proceeded with optimism to this one, the second in the new series. Unfortunately, the writing, plotting, and characterization in this book is all so poor that I suspect that it was not written by the original team. Or that one person in the Todd team wrote the Rutledge books based on research by the other (this is a mother/son team writing as Charles Todd) and now in a moment of totally misplaced generosity, has permitted the researcher to pick up the pen. (Mind you, I am just theorizing in an effort to explain how bad this book is.) In any event, the book is an eye-glazing waste of time.

Did I mentioned that I used to be one of those people who never gave up on a book once I started it? Well, I was...and now I'm not. I have realized that life is too short to keep reading something you find annoying when you are reading for pleasure. Book club books and reading for professional development I will suffer through but not my recreational reading.

I found this to be of the "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am" style of writing, which is not my favorite. I like some details and a little believability in my mysteries, this one just hit me over the head with the unlikely and coincidental. Sad, because I am always looking for a historical fiction series I can love. This isn't it.

I am a huge fan of the mother/son team writing as Charles Todd. I am midway through their wonderful Ian Rutledge mystery series and think it is rather brilliant. Sad to say, I am not as enamored of their Bess Crawford mysteries. The protagonist, the aforementioned Bess, is your typical plucky heroine. The only daughter of a commander, she has chosen to serve as a sister (nurse) in the First World War. Associations with soldiers have led her to investigate murders. In the first book A Duty to the Dead (Bess Crawford), she was burdened with delivering a message to the family of a dying soldier. (A soldier who very well might have met something to Bess had he survived his wounds.) The book was a solid read and Bess' involvement in the murder mystery was implausible but understandable given her feelings for the soldier.

In this, the second book, Bess' involvement in the murder mystery makes her seem like a bit of a meddling busybody. She has never met the victim, doesn't really know any of her family members particularly well and is only tied to the crime in that she witnessed the victim having an emotional conversation with a soldier shortly before her death. Nevertheless, Bess dives into the investigation, makes all sorts of connections with people in the victims life, interferes in Scotland Yards investigation, and flits back and forth between London and the on-going theater of war in France. It is exhausting, implausible and frankly annoying.

The book does move along, maybe a bit too quickly, and the writing is okay. What is missing is a convincing storyline, characters we care about, and an engaging protagonist.

I highly recommend the Inspector Ian Rutledge series: A Test of Wills (Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries)(first book in series).

Recommend reading the first book in this series A Duty to the Dead (Bess Crawford) but only for ardent fans and advise skipping this effort (or checking it out of the library if you have nothing better to read).

I was excited to get and read the second novel in the Bess Crawford series. Disappointingly, the second is not as good as the first. Other reviewers have written about the plot line, so I will just say I found the story lagged in the middle. there were too many characters and too many coincidences, and by the time the novel ended, I found I didn't really care any more and did not find the ending satisfying. I'll buy the next Bess Crawford novel, if there is one, and try the Rutledge books because I enjoy the time period and the writing. Disappointed in this one, however.

Both the back cover of the advance reading copy and the Amazon site itself have any number of rave reviews for this book. I can't help wondering why. I found this novel's pacing slow and tiresome; the endless repeated ruminations of lead character Bess Crawford were maddening after a while, as potential theories about the murders got thrown into her mental Cuisinart and spun around and around. To me the villain of the piece was fairly obvious early on. Then it was just a slog to get to the end and have it confirmed. The vast majority of characters in this book are described by hair and eye color and whether or not they are capable of smiling. The war details were minimal while specifics about Bess Crawford were non-existent. Her age, for example; what she looked like, etc. Perhaps these details were covered in the first book of this series but they're entirely absent in this one. I opted to review this mystery in the hope that the mother-son team of Charles Todd might have regained some of the zest and intensity of the first few Ian Rutledge books ... which, ultimately, also became tiresome. But that's not the case. Much of An Important Witness struck me as stereotypical -- with the strong, reliable male character ready at any time to swoop in and either reprimand headstrong Bess or to rescue the determined, all but obsessive young woman. Two of the female characters--Serena and Victoria--are pretty much interchangeable in their narcissistic rage. As I said, it's a slog.

I'm a big fan of the Charles Todd stories, but I needed a map in this one--zipping around a countryside I don't know as well as the action demanded. London. Countryside. France. Some other part of the country side. A bit of a suspension of disbelief--you can't get sugar, but you can get petrol? Set in the midst of the Great War, before the Americans got into the fight.

Perhaps the chain of coincidence got a bit long, too. "Just happened" to see the obit. Just happened to see... a stranger on a train. Just happened this, that, some other critical event.

It's not my favorite of the Charles Todd books. I like their writing style and level of detail, but this dragged in the middle, and I did wish I'd get off the sofa and get down the atlas.