An Impartial Witness: A Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd

For a change of pace, I picked up this advanced reading copy from an ALA conference. It's a series, but I've never read the previous books and have no need to. Bess Crawford is a English nurse serving in World War I and is a witness to a conversation at a train station. Next thing you know, she's interviewed by Scotland Yard, testifies in a murder trial, and sets off to solve the mystery herself. I loved the details about France and England during the war and the descriptions of the appropriate behavior of the time. The plot is really conversation driven, and even the mystery is solved by paying attention to the conversations of the characters. That got a little old for me, but it was worth it to read a different kind of book.