It’s June of 1940. Dunkirk has happened. France had surrendered. The day of the formal surrender – June 22, 1940 – is approaching. And in Britain, there’s a collective holding of breath. What happens now?
For Dr. Benjamin Bones, working in the village of Birdswing in Cornwall, what happens is another murder. A body is found in a stream nearby. It’s finally identified as that of a young man from Plymouth, and he’s been kicked and beaten to death. The case takes on a different overtone when the body is identified – a young Jewish man, the sole support of his young brothers and sisters.
The discovery brings out the best and the worst in the local residents. Dr. Bones, and his great love Lady Juliet Linton, are surprised by the depth of anti-Semitic feeling from the people they like and thought they knew. It seems particularly virulent among the more upper-class crowd who gather at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth, already infiltrated by Lady Juliet’s errant husband working undercover for the British government. But what happened to the young man?
Emma Jameson
Bones is joined by the official investigator, a detective from Plymouth who himself is Jewish and knows firsthand what discrimination is like in the police department. Lady Juliet is not to be left out, and she finds innovative ways to investigate on her own.
Bones Buried Deep is the fourth of four Dr. Benjamin Bones mysteries by British mystery author Emma Jameson, who’s also written the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mystery series (all set in London and have something to do with the word “blue”).
This installment in the Dr. Bones series, like its predecessors, is leavened by humor (Jameson has created a great comic detective with Lady Juliet). And humor is definitely needed in what would be a dark tale indeed without it, a tale of vicious discrimination, death, black marketing, and the overhand of war.
Related:
Something Blue by Emma Jameson.
Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson.
Bones in the Blackout by Emma Jameson.
Bones at the Manor House by Emma Jameson.
Some Monday Readings
Technological Poverty – Matthew Walther at The Lamp.
A Quiet Refusal to Compromise – Elizabeth Corey at Law & Liberty.
The Novel That Kept a British Prime Minister Up All Night – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Art is the Signature of Man – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.
Why Essex is Britain’s most right-wing county – Daniel Dieppe at the Critic Magazine.
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