“Treacherous is the Night” - Anna Lee Huber

 (Verity Kent book 2)

💣 Huber dedicated this novel to what she views as the overlooked victims of war - refugees and citizens of occupied territories, who survive under the thumb of the enemy. She also dedicated it to women who - though often overlooked and disregarded - carry on and make invaluable contributions for which they seldom received due credit.

 

💣 TITN takes a look at German sympathizers post-WWI. Novels set in this time period often focus exclusively on the victors; but it would be unrealistic to assume that N*zi and German sympathizers automatically accepted the outcome of the war. Naturally, many would be unhappy with the outcome, and of those, some would try to retaliate.

💣 Another focus of this novel is the status of affairs in postwar Belgium. Having survived the grueling N*zi occupation which saw Belgian resources decimated, the Belgian government lacked funds, Belgian cities were in ruins, the economy on fumes, and the citizenry was continuing to scrape together subsistence. The end of the war did not return Belgium to anything close to the prewar status quo. Hence, the maintenance of law and order were of low priority for the beleaguered government.

💣 Placing herself alongside a former secret service colleague in the crosshairs of an unknown party, Verity must uncover the person/s behind post-war threats (which government brass decline to take seriously) before catastrophic harm is done. In places, I found the Sidney/Verity storyline even more riveting than the actual mystery. Huber realistically portrays Sidney’s difficulty in processing Verity’s wartime work - the untold risks she undertook as a secret service agent don’t reconcile with the young bride he’d left behind when he enlisted. Huber shows us that it was not only the men who returned from the Great War changed.

💣 I enjoyed this mystery, and recommend it to those who like espionage stories and WWI historical fiction. 

I have a few more thoughts about interesting historical details that Huber includes in her narrative listed below in no particular order:

💣  La Dame Blanche  was the Belgian resistance movement named for the myth that a woman in white would herald the fall of the German King. Their work, under the very eyes of the occupiers, is fascinating.

💣 Huber touches upon the surge in post-WWI fraudulent mediums (addressed in the Maisie Dobbs series as well), to take advantage of widespread grief during a financially depressed time globally. Huber adds the horrifying detail of tour companies hawking guided tours of the battlefields where the bereaved could walk the very ground recently strewn with death. Beyond the specter of profiteering over these deaths, was also the very real danger of treading on land mines.

💣 We also learn more about the soldiers returning from the war with ghastly facial injuries, who turned to galvanized copper masks to conceal their disfigurements. It was another consequence of war that was very real for many, in addition to the PTSD and lingering effects of mustard gas.