Author Dana Stabenow shared a review of The New Forest Murders by Matthew Sweet. There are a couple copies in stock if you would like to check the Webstore. https://bit.ly/45d5AFU
The New Forest Murders
by Matthew Sweet
Jill Metcalfe’s brother Henry has just been killed in France on a mission to steal Abwehr documents. The news is brought to her and her father by American Army Captain Jack Strafford, who is on his own mission and not just to inform the bereaved. Henry had discovered a spy transmitting bombing coordinates to Germany right from their own village of Larkwhistle, and lived long enough to give Jack just enough information to come to Larkwhistle and ferret him or her out.
And then that very same afternoon the vicar’s son is found murdered in the New Forest at the foot of the tree featured in the children’s book that had made him famous, and Jill dragoons Jack into taking her on as an aide-de-camp in solving both murders because it’s better than sitting around with her father thinking about Henry.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, Jill had lost a lot of pleasure to the war. Since Hitler crossed the Polish border, there had been little romantic glory to report…Tonight she was making an effort for a provincial dinner party at the home of a woman for whom she did not particularly care, on a mission that made her hot with uneasy excitement. What did one wear, exactly, if the object of the evening was to prove that the host was a German spy plotting to set Southern England ablaze?
Everyone, the vicar, his wife, the publican, his daughter, the invalided Army officer, his wife the author, the postmistress, all of whom Jill has known since she was a child, is a suspect with motives ranging from adultery to treason, and not one of them is entirely what their carefully maintained facade shows to the world.
He wasn’t that sweet little boy from the book, you know.
but to Jill
Peter was the boy at the altar, following his father, his surplice dazzlingly white. He was the consummate tree-climber of whom, she knew, her brother had felt mildly jealous. Or he was the young man who fell out with his father and was reconciled. All these versions of him, she now saw, had only a flat two-dimensional quality.
The mystery Henry leaves behind and the murder of the vicar’s son are both resolved and the lovers united by the end, but there is a quality about this novel that has haunted me since I finished it. Yes, it’s a mystery, or two, really. Yes, there are murders, two of them. One does hope the first murderer is shot by the French after the war, and while the solving of the second mostly due to Jill’s excellent detective work shows Jack just how worthy she is (“You’re wonderful” he says when she realizes that there are two keys to the code they are trying to break), this is more a story about small communities and the secrets they keep about themselves and each other, even in the face of the most horrible war in human history. Beautifully written, highly recommended.
Dana
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