Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Today we call it PTSD--post-traumatic stress disorder (and mystery lovers can get a good look at it in its present incarnation in Julia Spencer Fleming's latest Clare Fergusson/Russ VanAlstyne novel "One Was a Soldier"), but during the two World Wars of the 20th century it was called "shellshock." And too often the "treatment" was execution by firing squad.
The after-effects of one such incident are what put Capt. John Emmett in a veterans' hospital in 1920. Now, just as he seems to have been working his way back to some semblance of his old self, comes word that he has committed suicide. His sister Mary needs to know why and turns to the only friend of her brother's that she knows, Laurence Bartram, another British officer who's trying with not much success to create some sort of postwar life for himself --his wife and son died in childbirth while he was serving in France. Mary suspects that incompetence or something seriously amiss at the veterans' hospital may be at the root of it and asks Laurence to investigate. And, oh yes, might he also look into the who and why of all these people unknown to John's family who were given sizable bequests in his will? For help, Laurence calls on his friend Charles--an Agatha Christie aficionado and one of those guys who knows everybody who's anybody. Before long a much broader mystery comes to the fore: Not only is John Emmett dead, but so too are some other members of his company who survived the war, all of whom had been assigned to the same army execution squad. Is there a connection? Could this "suicide" have been a murder?
So begins a most intriguing mystery that takes us deep into The Great War and the world of postwar Britain, with a cadre of well drawn characters you'll come to care about and a plot based on a dreadful truth: During WWI the British military executed some 300 of its own soldiers--only three of them officers.
I think you'd be hard put to find a more powerful, well researched and involving novel about that than "The Return of Captain John Emmett." I couldn't recommend it more highly. Too bad it was given such a bland, unrevealing title.
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London, 1920. In the aftermath of the Great War and a devastating family tragedy, Laurence Bartram has turned his back on the world. But with a well-timed letter, an old flame manages to draw him back in. Mary Emmett's brother John—like Laurence, an officer during the war—has apparently killed himself while in the care of a remote veterans' hospital, and Mary needs to know why. Aided by his friend Charles—a dauntless gentleman with detective skills cadged from mystery novels—Laurence begins asking difficult questions. What connects a group of war poets, a bitter feud within Emmett's regiment, and a hidden love affair? Was Emmett's death really a suicide, or the missing piece in a puzzling series of murders? As veterans tied to Emmett continue to turn up dead, and Laurence is forced to face the darkest corners of his own war experiences, his own survival may depend on uncovering the truth. At once a compelling mystery and an elegant literary debut, The Return of Captain John Emmett blends the psychological depth of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy with lively storytelling from the golden age of British crime fiction.
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