Death at Greenway

In 1941, trainee nurse Bridget Kelly, the heroine of this richly nuanced mystery from Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Rader-Day (The Lucky One), is mourning the bombing deaths of her mother and siblings when she makes a medication dosing mistake that kills a man. Her supervisor assigns her to care for children being evacuated from London and promises that if she does well, her training can resume. With 10 infants and toddlers and a fellow nurse who says her name is also Bridget Kelly but goes by Gigi, Bridget travels to Greenway, the Devon holiday home of author Agatha Christie, which is empty except for staff while Christie and her husband do war work. Gigi is unreliable and faints at the sight of blood, but her effervescence helps lighten Bridget’s sadness and self-doubt. When a strangled corpse is found in a nearby river, Bridget recognizes it as a man whom she discovered wandering in Greenway’s garden one morning. Soon afterward, Gigi disappears. Through multiple viewpoints, Rader-Day nicely evokes the isolation and dislocations of people in WWII Britain while revealing her characters’ complexities. Despite the many allusions to Christie’s life and work, she eschews an artificially neat conclusion. Fans of both Christie and Rader-Day will relish this. Agent: Sharon Bowers, Folio Literary. (Oct.)