Treacherous Is the Night

Treacherous Is the Night (2018) Anna Lee Huber

Set in Europe in 1919.

The second Verity Kent story finds Verity and her husband trying to come to terms with each other–and decide if their marriage will survive his letting her think he was dead for more than a year.

I was still coming to grips with his return. Still trying to reconcile myself to the fact that he’d allowed me to believe him dead for fifteen months. Still trying to bridge the distance four and a half years of war had built between us. Our five-year wedding anniversary would be in October, and yet these four weeks since his reappearance were the longest we’d ever spent together.

I’ll be honest, I borrowed this from the library, because as much as I like Anna Lee Huber, I can’t afford a lot of new releases, and for her it’s her Lady Darby series. It’s not that I won’t buy the book eventually–it’s just that it’ll have to wait till the price drops.

Verity’s friend Daphne drags her a spiritualist, where Verity receives a supposed message from a woman with whom she had worked undercover during the war. This messages draws Verity into searching for the agent (and friend) and puts an even greater strain on her marriage.

One of the fascinating things about this series is that it takes a blunt look at the aftermath of the Great War.

Tens of thousands of laborers were at work on the monumental task of tidying up the battlefields, but it would take years to set things to right. To gather up the barbed wire, the twisted scraps of wood and metal, the spent shell casings. To remove the empty ammunition boxes and rifles, the heaps of overturned tanks, and the stumps of shattered trees. To extract the unexploded shells and corpses. To fill in the trenches and cratered landscape of shell holes.

London wasn’t exactly short on men wearing masks these days. Those soldiers who had come home with horrific facial injuries often had to settle for concealing their disfigurements with galvanized copper masks painted with their former likeness, or that of another person.

I’ve actually seen pictures of some of these masks, as we’ve gone through the 100th anniversaries of important events of The Great War. The damage done to the men who survived was horrifying–and yet so many of those scars were ignored in so many ways.

The mystery here was interesting, but not quite as compelling as the history as well as the difficulties Verity and Sidney were having, coming to terms with what they did in the war. It was fascinating to me that Sidney expected Verity to be totally okay with allowing her to believe he was dead, and that he might take exception to actions she took while she believed he was dead.

But it was 1919, and things were very different.

I do like this series very much, just not quite as much as the Lady Darby series.

Publisher: Kensington
Rating: 8/10

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