A Question of Honor

by Charles Todd Book 5 in the Bess Crawford Mysteries series.

First published 2013

Amazon

4.4(1,408)

During the summer of 1918, Bess Crawford learns that an officer believed to have died after murdering five people in India may be serving under another name on the Western Front. The case reaches back to her childhood in her father’s regiment and to memories the adults around her preferred not to explain. Using her leave to investigate, Bess follows the officer’s history from military cantonments to English homes and discovers that the accepted facts conceal a more troubling form of betrayal.

The novel links the British Raj to the First World War, showing how regimental honour and imperial distance could protect reputations while silencing vulnerable people. Bess’s personal connection makes the inquiry unusually painful: solving it requires her to question the moral certainty on which her own upbringing was built.