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  • The Shattered Tree

  • A Bess Crawford Mystery
  • By: Charles Todd
  • Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
  • Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (21 ratings)
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The Shattered Tree cover art

The Shattered Tree

By: Charles Todd
Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
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Summary

Edgar Award winner, Mary Higgins Clark, 2017.

World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford goes to dangerous lengths to investigate a wounded soldier's background - and uncover his true loyalties - in this thrilling and atmospheric entry in the best-selling "vivid period mystery series" (New York Times Book Review). 

At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher bearers find an exhausted officer shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is the officer isn't British - he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German. 

When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian? And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie? 

Of course Matron could be right, but Bess remains uneasy - and unconvinced. If he was a French soldier, what was he doing so far from his own lines...and so close to where the Germans are putting up a fierce last-ditch fight? 

When the French officer disappears in Paris, it's up to Bess - a soldier's daughter as well as a nurse - to find out why, even at the risk of her own life. 

©2016 Charles Todd (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about The Shattered Tree

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Great story of hate, love, revenge and redemption

Set at the closing of the first world war when people had seen and done too much and were desperate for it to end. It's a story that perhaps relies on coincidence a little too heavily, but other than that it's absorbing and interesting with a few twists that are not signposted heavily. I have read or listened to all this series and its just as good as the others. There is great historical accuracy and it really reflects the weariness of the people and the hopelessness of it ever ending or of there being anything good to come. Having said that it's not as depressing as I made that sound and there is a feeling of hope and satisfaction at the end that some things are back as they should be.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

The path to Hell

I was disappointed in this book. Bess Crawford seems to be behaving like a spoilt child, not a responsible nurse that her alter ego assumes. At the front she is sensible, but in Paris where she meant to be convalescing she gads about like a spring lamb. I am sure if I were wounded such actions would not be possible. She does seem to be very silly in her reluctance to confide in Simon or one of the other officers around her.

I am sure I will buy more of this series, hoping that this is an aberration, because she cannot go on as a one-man band or Wonder Woman. It really is becoming too improbable.

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