The least she can do is ensure his body is found and reburied, and she is going to need her nerves of steel to survive the obstacles in her path, this is no place for a woman, most witnesses are dead, information is scarce, not available, or non-existent. The privileged Amy is bearing a burden of guilt, the pacifist Edward, a Cambridge school music teacher, would never have joined the war effort if it wasn't for her, her rigid mother, Lady Constance, had refused to accept him as a suitable suitor, he was not of their social class. It is a dangerous task too, as there are deadly booby traps that claim new war victims, when a woman, Amy Vanneck, arrives determined to find the body of her missing fiance, Captain Edward Haslem, of the 7th Manchesters, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes, missing presumed dead. It is 1919, and co-ordinating one of these heroic operations in Northern France is Captain James Mackenzie, soldiering on in the face of a nightmare of hell, with its heavy toll on the sullen, withdrawn and resentful volunteers, he is driven by compassion to bring some form of closure for grieving relatives back home.

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.In this superb WW1 historical drama that goes back and forth in time, Philip Gray with his impressive research gives us a rare glimpse into the post-war abandoned battlefields and those army volunteers who carried out the soul destroying task of attempting to identify a few of the over 500 000 dead soldiers, their bodies in various states of decomposing decay, through tags and other possessions. It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint. Meanwhile, Captain Mackenzie cannot bring himself to go home until his fallen comrades are laid to rest. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved. Special battalions now face the task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.Īmy Vanneck’s fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many. On the battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. ‘The world has been waiting for a worthy successor to Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong – now Philip Gray has delivered it’ David Young, author of Stasi Childġ919. **A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick**

Two storm wood philip gray