Shattered Tree

<p>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 bestselling vivid period mystery series (<em>New York Times Book Review</em>).</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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?</p>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.