An Impartial Witness

An Impartial Witness (2010) Charles Todd

Bess Crawford is escorting wounded soldiers back to London, including a pilot who was badly burned, and whose thoughts of his wife seem to be what is pulling him through the horror of his injuries. Bess sees the wife, making a tearful plea to a soldier, but before Bess can reach them, the soldier has gotten on his train and the wife has disappeared into the crowd.

I’m enjoying reading about Bess Crawford, and her experiences of life during the Great War. I don’t know much about that time period–but it was a time of transition, when transportation was still split between automobiles and horse drawn conveyances in the country. When women still wore corsets, yet women were also serving as nurses during the war.

I also like the serendipity of see things I’ve recently read about elsewhere. I’ve been reading Lives of the Trees and just learned that in Britain, lindens are called lime trees. That bit of information made this passage, “I was just coming up the avenue of lime trees later that day when I heard Simon’s motorcar pulling in behind me.” Considering that England is not tropical, knowing that lindens are called lime trees, makes much more sense. (Especially since I already have a mental association of British sailors being called “limeys.”)

He also does a good job bringing to mind just how horrifying this war was for those who were living through it. The Great War was being fought with modern weaponry using ancient strategy, and the toll was terrible.

There were any number of new graves, the earth still brown, and others were the grass was just a tender green. I tried not to think that for every man who died of wounds here in England, hundreds of others were buried in makeshift cemeteries in France.

It was a different time, this era on the cusp of what we’d consider modernity, where men had created better and better tools to kill one another, but hadn’t yet caught up with ways to save those we went to battle.

Of course, that’s not what this story was about. This book was, in fact, about murder, and Bess trying to solve that murder and see justice.

But although I knew relatively quickly who the murderer was (it paralleled another story I remembered) I still read avidly, wanting to see what Bess would discover.
Rating: 8/10

Published by HarperCollins

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