The facts are as follows: in January1920, Florence Nightingale Shore, a British nurse, was found murdered on a train travelling between London's Victoria Station and St. Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex. Witnesses saw a man in a brown suit leaving the train but the police were never able to identify him and the crime remained unsolved.
Enter Jessica Fellowes, journalist and author of the Downton Abbey companion books, who has taken the bare bones of the murder and dressed it up as the first in a projected series of mysteries featuring the notorious Mitford sisters, whom she calls the "Kardashians" of British society in the first half of the 20th century. In Fellowes re-imagining, it's then 16-year-old Nancy Mitford, eldest of the brood, who becomes obsessed with solving the crime. The (fictional) link in the book is that the Mitford's nanny's sister is a friend of Miss Shore.
An impoverished young woman running away from an abusive home life, equally improbably, happens to be an old classmate of a girl who is friends with Nancy Mitford, and through this connection lands a job as a nursery maid for the Mitfords, where she becomes the confidante of young Nancy. There is lots of period detail and nostalgia, but not quite enough to overcome the torturous convolutions of the plot or the stereotyped characters.
The author's intention is to have each of the six Mitford sisters serve as the heroine of one of the books in the series. Alas, Downton Abbey this isn't.
If you'd like to read about the real Florence Nightingale Shore, who was the god-daughter and namesake of Florence Nightingale, find a copy of Rosemary Cook's The Nightingale Shore Murder (2nd ed. 2015).
Click HERE to read an interview with the author from British Heritage Magazine.
Click HERE to read a review from Publishers Weekly.
Click HERE to read a review from Kirkus Reviews.
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