#1 – A Duty to the Dead
In November 1916, nursing sister Bess Crawford survives the sinking of the hospital ship Britannic carrying a final message from a dying officer. When she delivers it to his family in Kent, she finds a household bound together by grief, resentment and a secret concerning another…
#2 – An Impartial Witness
While escorting wounded soldiers from France, Bess Crawford recognizes the distraught wife of one of her patients in a London railway station. Soon afterwards the woman is found murdered, and Bess realizes that her brief glimpse may make her an important witness. Her attempt to understand…
#3 – A Bitter Truth
Returning from France for Christmas leave in 1917, Bess Crawford helps a frightened woman who has fled an unhappy marriage. At the family’s country house, an old quarrel, a missing child and the death of a guest turn hospitality into suspicion. When Bess herself becomes vulnerable…
#4 – An Unmarked Grave
In the spring of 1918, Bess Crawford is working in an overwhelmed military hospital when she notices the body of an officer who did not die from influenza or battle wounds. Before she can report the murder, illness removes her from the ward and the corpse…
#5 – A Question of Honor
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…
#6 – An Unwilling Accomplice
Home on leave, Bess Crawford is assigned to escort a decorated, wheelchair-bound soldier to Buckingham Palace. By the following morning he has disappeared, and reports soon connect him to a murder in Shropshire. Held responsible by both the Army and the nursing service, Bess must find…
#7 – A Pattern of Lies
An explosion at the Ashton Gunpowder Mill in Kent has killed more than a hundred men and left the owning family accused of negligence or sabotage. Bess Crawford encounters the Ashtons while public hostility is hardening into violence and their son Philip faces arrest. The only…
#8 – The Shattered Tree
In October 1918, stretcher-bearers bring Bess Crawford a badly wounded officer found near a shell-shattered tree. He wears a French uniform but speaks German in a moment of stress, raising questions about whether he is an Alsatian soldier, a deserter or an enemy agent. When he…
#9 – A Casualty of War
Near the end of the war, Bess Crawford treats Captain Alan Travis after a head wound leaves him convinced that his English cousin deliberately shot him. The evidence suggests the accusation is impossible, and the captain is eventually confined in a clinic for severe brain injuries.…
#10 – A Forgotten Place
After the Armistice, Bess Crawford works in a clinic helping amputees face an uncertain civilian future. A letter from a former patient takes her to a remote coal-mining community on the Welsh coast, where unemployed veterans feel abandoned and strangers are watched closely. When the man…
#11 – A Cruel Deception
With the fighting over but the peace unsettled, Bess Crawford travels to Paris to locate a young officer needed by his family and government colleagues. She finds him physically safe but psychologically broken, dependent on drugs and convinced that someone intends to kill him. As Bess…
#12 – An Irish Hostage
Bess Crawford travels to County Galway for the wedding of a fellow nurse, expecting a brief reunion after the war. Instead the groom disappears, a man is murdered and the bride’s family is divided over relatives involved in the struggle against British rule. As suspicion turns…
#13 – The Cliff’s Edge
Uncertain what place remains for her after wartime nursing, Bess Crawford agrees to assist a family friend in Yorkshire. A fatal accident in isolated Scarfdale leaves one man dead, another gravely injured and two neighbouring families confined together while the police conduct an inquest. Bess soon…