Customer Reviews

We Shall Not Sleep: A Novel (World War One Novels)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a huge Anne Perry fan, but even my high opinion of her writing was actually shaken to the foundations with this series. This is a wonderful series. All five books are masterpieces in their own right, and this book, which is the final one in the series did not disappoint me. In it we finally have an answer as to who "The Peacemaker" was. There is also another mystery in it, but this one, although a particularly brutal one, was an indication of how the world changed after the end of the First World War. This is a hearbreaking series, and totally riveting. I would not have missed it for the world, and I highly recommend it to anyone who can appreciate wonderful storytelling, as well as realistic characterizations. Ms. Perry's portrayal of how the world changed after this war is poignant and spell-binding.

With war finally coming to an end, leaving millions dead and the landscape of Europe forever changed, Anne Perry concludes her World War I spy/mystery saga. This five-book series paints the themes of honor, loyalty, betrayal, heroism, good and evil on the large canvas of world war, but it also develops storylines of daily life on the battlefields and at home.

It is now November 1918, years into a war that was only supposed to last months. And the war is coming to end. Members of the Reavley family --- Joseph, the army chaplain; his brother Matthew, the Secret Intelligence Service officer; and their sister Judith, the ambulance driver --- are together under dire circumstances as they strive to unmask the Peacemaker. They now have the means to find out exactly who he is and bring him to light. The Peacemaker has already cost them their parents, friends and others of importance to England.

A messenger dressed as a Swiss priest comes to see Matthew with news. They now have an ally against the Peacemaker in Germany. This man, Manfred von Schenckendorff, is willing to come across enemy lines to London and expose the Peacemaker to tell the Prime Minister. His own country will be betrayed by this decision, but he hopes his defection will help with the peace process. When Matthew is asked where Manfred should come through on the Western Front, Matthew sends him to Yrpes where Joseph is stationed. When Matthew tells Joseph what he knows, Joseph can hardly believe it and questions if it's true.

The Peacemaker has big plans for England, Germany and Europe. He has argued that the greater end justifies the smaller ugliness of his means. And he reminds the war reporter Mason of just that point when he visits. Mason takes this philosophy to mean that the Peacemaker had used means that he despised, which allows Mason to continue to sympathize with him.

Mason has been a supporter of the Peacemaker's plans because of the horrors they both experienced in the Boer War. Mason returns to the Western Front to report on the end of the war and renews his acquaintance with Judith Reavley. He has come to realize that the Peacemaker is an armchair warrior using other people's blood for his own purposes. In this case, the Peacemaker's plan is one of domination of the Western World by governments who believe as the Peacemaker does.

Meanwhile, Manfred arrives in Ypres with a bayonet injury to his foot. As Joseph and Matthew wait to take him to England, a nurse is murdered. She was a flirt and not well liked; anyone could have killed her. Was it a German prisoner? Or one of their own soldiers?

A civil policeman investigates, and the commanding officer requests Joseph's help. However, when Matthew is arrested for her murder, Joseph and Judith work together to find the real killer. In their race against time to get Manfred to London, they find evidence that frees Matthew --- only to have Manfred arrested. As they dig deeper, the private lives of the nurses and troops lead them to uncover the murderer.

With the murder solved, the three Reavleys, along with Manfred and now Mason, borrow an ambulance in order to catch a boat for London. Perils await them as they make the trip, but they arrive to see the Prime Minister. They have the necessary evidence, testimony and knowledge to identify and make their case against the Peacemaker.

Anne Perry has honored this time in history with her series. The struggles portrayed by the characters --- both those of impeccable character and those who are flawed --- are memorable. The overall series mystery of the Peacemaker's identity keeps readers on the edge of their chairs all the way to the end. The underlying tensions of a world at war bring to the audience an awareness of the costs of war, government decisions during chaotic times and the toll on humankind. WE SHALL NOT SLEEP (along with the entire series) will stay on this reviewer's shelf and is definitely worth a yearly read.

--- Reviewed by Jennifer McCord

This latest series featuring the Reavley family during WWI, Anne Perry has taken us out of the comfort zone and into the trenches. Perry has always been great with detailing the world she writes, and we experience the horror not only of war, but the intrigue of the Reavley family as they untangle the mystery of the Peacemaker. Their family was torn apart when their parents were murdered enroute to London to give Matthew, their son in military intelligence, a treaty that would form an alliance with England and Germany, (forming a society whose freedom would be limited).
Joseph, the older son is a military chaplain, Matthew the intellegence officer, and Judith, the youngest, is an ambulance driver. (The other sister, Hannah stays home to take care of her children while her husband is in the Navy).
The Reavleys get a break when a German official sees that the Peacemaker needs to be brought down. Matthew comes to the front to get him, and they (the Reavelys) get involved in solving a nurse's murder. They have to go to London to take the German to Lloyd George, the PM, to end the conflict.
This book ties up all the series' loose ends. It is not action packed, but it does answer every question and characters' fates posed in the series, and that is very rewarding.
Still the beauty of Perry's words and the atmosphere she creates are the forefront of this book. Will miss the series, although look forward to the Monk and Pitt series again.

Anne Perry used all five books in this series to paint a multidimensional portait of the Reavely family. I mourn their parting. I especially loved Joseph Reavely who desperately held onto the threads of his faith, even while facing the worst situations humankind could throw at him. He was humble and authentic and did not leave anyone to die alone. Anne also painted a portrait of our world during this uncelebrated and mostly forgotten era. I enjoyed every page.

it was probably too realistic on the WWI details for my taste. I was soo sick of rats and mud at the end, but so were the real solidiers, I suppose.

I am a big Anne Perry fan. I really enjoyed the first book in this series. I felt, however, that each succeeding book was just more of the same: life in the trenches, Joseph solving a mystery, and platitudes about the necessity of holding on to the war for the sake of Jolly Old England.
I was frankly really bored by the end of the series.

Since last November, I've been reading Anne Perry's series of novels about the Reavley family and their involvement in World War One. Each novel of the five volume series is set in succeeding years of the conflict that really marked the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth.

For the Reavleys, the war has been more than just a conflict. Their parents, John and Alys, were murdered on the day when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, and the great European powers were drawn into a massive war that took a terrible toll in human lives and toppled empires. In John's possession was a document that would have brought a lasting peace, but the price would have been a terrible one. Now his children -- Joseph, Matthew and Judith -- are struggling to find the identity of the person behind their parents' murder, known only as The Peacemaker.

Joseph has spent the last five years as a chaplain on the front lines in Belguim, trying to save what lives he can by bringing back the wounded from the front, and giving what comfort he can to the dying. In addition to what he has seen in the midst of battle, he has some deeply rooted scars from his past that still simmer. Working alongside him as an ambulance driver is his youngest sister, Judith, who has proven herself again and again, facing the same shortages as everyone else, and the same dangers. Matthew is working in London as an intellegence officer, desperately trying to find the truth about the Peacemaker.

Now it is November 1918. The Germans are still fighting, but thousands of them are putting down their weapons and surrendering. The war could be over in a matter of months or even days. But there are still plenty of dangers for all of them -- the British soldiers are roughing up the Germans, and tempers are getting frayed and ugly. In London, Matthew recieves a surprising offer -- the Peacemaker's counterpart in Germany is willing to come and reveal the identity of the Peacemaker, without any conditions. For it seems the Peacemaker has come up with an even more appalling plan -- he wants to continue the war, creating a never ending war, and reviving the German empire from the ashes.

To complicate matters, one of the nurses, Gwen Price, has been found brutally murdered, her naked body flung on a rubbish heap. Joseph is called upon to find who did it, but before he can unravel the mystery, the German officer with the information appears, and is charged with the murder. To complicate matters, his brother Matthew, who has arrived to escort the officer and the valuable information back to London is also arrested for the crime.

There are quite a few red herrings and subplots that are being wrapt up in this book. Lizzie Blaine, from a previous novel, reappears, forcing Joseph to contemplate a life beyond the endless warfare, and so has Richard Mason, the war correspondent that Judith has become close to. Along the way there are vivid descriptions of life and especially death on the Western front, with all of the attendant misery, mud, filth and lost lives.

While the ending is a bit too pat, all of the loose ends are tidied up, and there's even a promise of happiness in the future, short lived as we living in the here and now will know it will be. Perry manages to pack an awful lot of action into the space of a few days, all of it moving at a near breakneck speed. In between all of that, she has her characters endlessly thinking about the past, what is happening now, and what they can do to stop the onrushing disaster that will happen if they can't stop the Peacemaker.

In fact, it's that rumination and raking over the past that caused me the greatest amount of annoyance with the story. Over and over, Ms Perry tells us once again the how and why and who the Peacemaker has murdered -- just as she had done in the previous four novels. It gets tiresome, and assumes that the reader has the attention span of a rabid gerbil. It does very little to push the story along, and instead slows it down very much.

Now that I've completed reading the series, some thoughts overtook me. Perry has managed to do something very different than her ongoing series set in the Victorian World. For one, these five books have a definate begining and end, and she lets her main characters mature, instead remaining the static observers of the mysteries. Everyone in this one makes mistakes, rash decisions, and moves forward in their thinking and maturity. I do hope that Ms. Perry will continue along with sort of writing, and expanding beyond the 'whodunit' novel.

Another valid point is that Ms. Perry is very much a pacificist, and she draws comparisons to the warfare of the 1910's with our own modern times, and while it does take a strong stomach to read some of her descriptions of death and humans caught up in misery, she does it without getting too preachy about it.

Overall, the series gets about a four star rating. It's better than most novels set in World War One, and she works very hard to capture the feel and nature of warfare that is brutal even by modern standards. One caveat is that the series really does need to be read in order, as so much of the narrative relies on what has gone on before.

If you want something different than the usual rah-rah valiant hero in the middle of chaos of war, then this series should satisfy. While I doubt that I will ever reread these in the future, they are an excellent series of books, and worth the effort to get through.

Four stars. Recommended.

"WE SHALL NOT SLEEP" is the final novel in Anne Perry's ambitious 5 part WWI historical mystery series. This is a truly exceptional quintet. All the books contain thrilling murder mysteries, well researched historical fiction, chilling espionage, and an extraordinary cast of characters, featuring the members of the Reavley family. I have read all five novels, back-to-back, (couldn't put them down!), and after spending several weeks with Joseph, Matthew, and Judith Reavley, I feel like I am related to them. They are wonderful, complex people, with real depth of character, and the author deserves kudos for creating them.

Set just before and during the Great War, the series has one major storyline, which propels the action and keeps one riveted, but it is not resolved until the denouement, here, in "We Shall Not Sleep." This ongoing plot concerns the "Peacemaker," a mysterious figure who represents those who sought to make a treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V, which would have united warring Germany and Britain into a common front. The Peacemaker proposed to "create an Anglo-German empire to dominate the world, and to achieve peace by betraying France and the Low Countries to Germany, with Britain taking back the old empire, including the Americas." Now that the war is almost over, this traitor, in his high government position, will have a great effect on Britain's demands at the peace negotiations if he is not identified and arrested. His interests remain the same - "to create an Anglo-German Empire out of the ashes of war,"..."then there will be another war, because Europe will never let that happen."

It is October 1918, and although fierce fighting continues on the Ypres Salient, everyone knows that peace is at hand. "Half of Europe is ruined. America has lost more than three hundred thousand men, killed, wounded, or missing." The English have lost over "three million, Germany lost twice as many, and Austria-Hungary even more. The estimates are, altogether, beyond thirty-five million casualties." The trenches are dark and cold, flooded and rat infested. Men have to stand for days on end up to their waists, or even their armpits, in freezing water and mud filled with decay.

The balance of power has been altered and the old rule swept away. The Kaiser has been toppled, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is crumbling. In Russia, the Bolshevik revolutionary forces replace the tsarist regime. And America has emerged as a new world power.

In early 1914, John Reavley, Joseph's, Matthew's, Hannah's and Judith's father, a former member of Parliament, discovered a document - a treaty signed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Peacemaker was going to use his power and position to influence England's King George V to sign this pact between England and Germany. John and his wife, Alyce, were murdered while trying to deliver the papers to Joseph. But he found them and hid them away until he could prove that the terrifying and proposterous scheme was, in fact, a reality. Now, four years later, Manfred von Schenckendorff, the man who obtained the German monarch's signature, and who was, until recently, the Peacemaker's counterpart, wants to travel, incognito, through the lines, to London and speak to Prime Minister Lloyd George to expose the plot. Schenckendorff, an idealist, believed that the plan was for peace in Europe, so that England and Germany would rule without war "for all the years to come." Now he knows the dream was never a possibility.

Captian Joseph Reavley, chaplain and former Cambridge professor, continues to minister to the wounded and dying at the Ypres Salient. He has received the Military Cross and Distinguished Medal for his service of almost 5 years. Reavley's work has increased significantly in the last months, as German soldiers surrender in droves, some of them with serious injuries, others near death. Many are being treated at the field station where Reavley is stationed.

Lt. Colonel Matthew Reavley, Joseph's younger brother, and a member of England's Secret Intelligence Service, (SIS), has been fighting the war covertly from London, desperately trying to discover the identities of the "Peacemaker," and his treacherous minions. He crossed the English Channel on October 13, 1918, to join his brother Joseph, and sister Judith, a volunteer ambulance driver. His mission - to bring von Schenckendorff back to London where he will testify, verify his role in the plot, and identify the Peacemaker. Joseph, who knows the whereabouts of the document, will accompany them.

Von Schenckendorff, successfully crosses the lines and meets with Joseph. Matthew joins them, and also hooks up with Judith. When one of the nurses is found brutally murdered, von Schenckendorff, is accused and arrested. The murderer must be found before the war ends so the high ranking German official can be taken to London to expose the Peacemaker. And the crime must be solved before the Peacemaker can catch up with the small group, and put a stop to their plans.

Ms. Perry has included various subplots, which make for an even more entertaining read. There are also romantic involvements. Both Joseph and Judith have been moving towards permanent relationships over the period of the war - Joseph with a nurse, Judith with a war correspondent. These come to fruition in "WE SHALL NOT SLEEP," bringing a promise of hope for the future, at least for a lucky few.

Although there are some flaws throughout the novels, (nothing is perfect!), including a few in this one, I definitely rate this book and the other four with 5 Big Stars, overall, and in retrospect! The writing and character development are consistently excellent. The pace is fast, and the storyline and subplots are packed with action and believable dialogue. The author accomplished an amazing feat of research in order to construct this very valid work of historical fiction. I learned so much and was totally absorbed as I was transported back in time. I do recommend that you read the series in order, to avoid confusion and to enjoy the natural flow of the narrative. Very highly recommended!!
Jana Perskie

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

No Graves As Yet: A Novel (World War I)
At Some Disputed Barricade: A Novel (World War I)
Shoulder the Sky: A Novel (World War I)
Angels in the Gloom: A Novel (World War I)

The only thing bad I can say about this book is: it appears to be the last in that series. I would be so happy to hear there were more. They caught the bad guy, yes, indeed, but there's got to be more bad guys out there, aren't there? Please? I loved this book, I wish I could go back and read it new again, but I'll re-read it -- as I do the rest of the series -- probably twice or three times a year. Anne Perry is probably the best out there writing today.

This fifth and final book in Anne Perry's World War I mystery series is set in the war's final year.

It finally seems like they really will be home by Christmas this year. The Reavely family learns the identity of the elusive Peacemaker who was involved in the killing of their parents at the beginning of the war.

Everyone is also struggling with how and where they will fit in to the changed world once the war is over. They have seen so many horrible things at the front lines and fear they will never be able to forget them. Home and peace seem like an even more elusive dream now that the war is coming to an end.

It amazes me how relevant a book set in 1918 can be today, but it is. Read We Shall Not Sleep. You will not be disappointed but you may wish the series could continue. After 5 books set across 5 years, you feel invested in the characters' lives and their futures. Apparently I am not the only one who wishes this series will not end.

After doing some research I found that Ms. Perry does not plan on writing any more about the Reavely family. Perry is the author of over 50 books. The majority of her books are mysteries. Her most popular series are the Thomas & Charlotte Pitt series which starts with The Cater Street Hangman and also the William Monk series starting with The Face of a Stranger. I have read both and they are both great. She is also the winner of an Edgar award for her short story, Heroes.

Armchair Interviews says: These characters become "real" to you.