Charles Todd’s A Bitter Truth interweaves the vices of war with the failings of families into a psychologically and historically compelling mystery set in England in 1917. Bess Crawford, an intelligent and fearless nurse working on the front lines in France, comes home on leave to discover a frightened young woman with a bruised face hiding on the doorstep of her London flat. Unable by nature to leave the mysterious stranger out in the cold winter night, Bess convinces her to take shelter inside. Little does Bess know what a great deal of trouble she has brought into her life.
Charles Todd—who is actually a mother-son partnership made up of Caroline and Charles Todd—excels at keeping the war and its manifold repercussions and tragedies front and center even while much of the action takes place in England. Todd also portrays an extended family already traumatized before the war and now disintegrating under the war’s pressures. Bess finds herself unwillingly bound to this family through her initial concern for Lydia, the young woman on her doorstep and the possibility she needs to be protected from a violent marriage. That turns out to be only the first level of secrets and crimes that will be unveiled throughout.
You’re never sure whether those crimes and secrets arise from the war or whether they are connected to the private history of this one family. The interplay shows how, even far from the actual fighting, the war has torn apart even a small country town and its denizens. This is one of the most sophisticated critiques of the effects of war I’ve read—so subtle you won’t notice it while you’re enjoying the mystery, but its resonances will stay with you long after you finish reading.
This is the third of the Bess Crawford mysteries, preceded by A Duty to the Dead and An Impartial Witness. A fourth book in the series, An Unmarked Grave, is now available.