Recently, while reading the Jungle Red Writers blog, I was entranced by Laura Jensen Walker’s description of how she got the idea for this book: a TV show about nursing orderlies in the WWII British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Dubbed the “Flying Nightingales,” these women, some as young as 17, were give a mere six weeks medical training before being put in charge of the care of 24 wounded soldiers per flight. Since the planes carried supplies that included munitions, they could not be marked with a red cross, making them fair game to German fire. As Walker explained in her blog post “On the flights back to England, the nursing orderlies weren’t allowed to wear parachutes. They were expected to remain on board with the wounded if the plane crashed […]. The Nightingales changed bandages, emptied colostomy bags, cleared tracheotomy tubes, wedged sick bags beneath the chins of the wounded, and provided tea and comfort to soldiers with horrific injuries.”
Holy cow! I love historical mysteries and couldn’t resist this book. The stories of fictional characters Maeve, Betty, and Etta are partly based on the real-life experiences of the Flying Nightingales.
Irish Maeve joined the WAAF after the death of her fiancé which caused her to miscarry their baby. She devotes her life to caring for other soldiers and eventually finds healing and love again. Farm girl Betty joined after the loss of her brother hoping to care for others like him and finds unexpected love with a soldier in her care. Etta joined to escape a hard life of poverty and abuse and finds her calling in nursing. All the characters are complex and their experiences moved me to tears, something that never happens when I read purely fictional mysteries, I think I was touched because real people suffered similar trauma and losses during the war. I genuinely cared about what happened to each girl and was relieved to find that the book included an epilogue so I could see how their lives turned out.
This is not a typical mystery. There are murders but they are incidental to the experiences of the Nightingales, their patients, their medical and military colleagues, and the war. No one acts as a detective and actively pursues the clues that lead to the killer. The revelation of the killer was also incidental but it made sense under the circumstances of the plot. Normally this deviation from the standard mystery novel would bother me, but this time it did not because I was so entranced by the lives of the characters and history they were experiencing.
One neat surprise I enjoyed was the appearance of young Audrey, a member of the Dutch Resistance who helps the characters who crash land in German-occupied Holland. Even though her last name isn’t given the description makes it clear this beautiful waif is none other than Audrey Hepburn.
Since the lives of the characters are wrapped up when the war ends, this clearly is not the first book in a new series; however, it makes me eager to read more of Walker’s books. She created such interesting and realistic characters for this book that I’m sure I’d like to meet her equally complex series characters. — Cathy Akers-Jordan