A Casualty of War

Though the Great War is nearing its end, the fighting still rages on. Waiting for her transport north, nurse Bess Crawford meets Captain Alan Travis, an Englishman whose branch of the Travis family made its fortune on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Then, at the beginning of November, Captain Travis is brought into Bess’s forward aid station disoriented from a head wound. He insists that the man who shot him was an English officer—a distant cousin named James Travis—and asks for Bess’s help finding him. Her inquiries in the captain’s sector about James lead nowhere. Days later, the captain is severely wounded, and again he accuses James of shooting him. But Bess has been told that James couldn’t possibly have shot his cousin, which brings Alan Travis’s sanity into question.As the war comes to a bloody end, Bess is given leave, and in an English clinic for brain injuries, she discovers a suicidal Captain Travis strapped to his bed. Horrified by his condition, she and Sergeant-Major Simon Brandon travel to James Travis’s home in Suffolk to learn more about the baffling relationship between these two cousins. Her search for the truth about Alan Travis will lead Bess into unexpected danger—and bring her face-to-face with the visible and invisible wounds of war that not even the much-longed-for peace can heal.