Two Storm Wood
Uncover an unsettling mystery of World War One in the The Times Thriller of the Year
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE GUNS ARE SILENT. THE DEAD ARE NOT
'The world has been waiting for a worthy successor to Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong - now Philip Gray has delivered it' David Young, author of Stasi Child.
1919. On the battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.
Amy Vanneck's fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.
Meanwhile, Captain Mackenzie cannot bring himself to go home until his fallen comrades are laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.
It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.
*Longlisted for the 2023 CWA Historical Dagger Award*
'An atmospheric portrayal of the pity of the war' The Times, Books of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set largely in northern France a few months after the end of WWI, this uneven historical from British author Gray (Zoia's Gold, writing as Philip Sington) follows an affluent English woman on a quest to find her fiancé, who went missing in action and is presumed dead. Amy Vanneck, who made a promise to choirmaster turned reluctant soldier Edward Haslam that she would bring him (or his body) home, travels to the trenches where Haslam was last seen in search of her lover. With British troops scouring the area attempting to identify the thousands of scattered corpses, Amy enters a virtual hell scape of death and destruction, where she discovers that her missing fiancé was somehow connected to the murders of 13 men, all Chinese laborers. Flashbacks to the war heighten the tension, and the mystery of Haslam's whereabouts remains tantalizingly unclear until the very end. But the central character—a sheltered woman who witnesses and experiences numerous atrocities alone—strains the boundaries of believability, as does the unnecessary closing twist. Thriller fans will be disappointed.
