I’m Bridget Kelly. Bridey, like I’m to be married but I’m not. Bridey is what my mum and my sisters and brother called me, and here I’ve gone and let the little ones here and everyone else call me that again.

I don’t have the Blitz spirit. Not the way some do, collecting metals, listening to the wireless for recipes for the tiny rations we’re allotted, knitting warm scarves for the Front. I don’t know how people find the time.

But it’s not time they’ve found, when I haven’t. It’s heart. I had it once and now—

And now.

No, it’s not time. I have time good and proper now, don’t I? Minding children, in the country, instead of nursing. Learning to nurse, in any case, and I was well on my way— I could have been. Matron says I’ve made an error, and a soldier’s life was lost.

I’d already lost everything and now my position as well. How am I to become a proper nurse now, spending the long days at Greenway House the way we do? Long days after nights spent up with the smallest ones, both of whom Gigi has managed to leave in my care.

A regular morning for the children should start early with a march on the lavatory to the little potties Mrs. Arbuthnot has set up, before someone has an unfortunate occurrence on the floors. The Mistress wouldn’t care for that. The Mistress—they all call her that, or Mrs. M. Mrs. M is the authoress, Agatha Christie but rather a shadow here. A library full of murder books, if you care for that sort of thing, reading novels.

After the potties, hands washed, the children have their porridge, not at all hot, and milk. They eat from little plates, bowls, and cups, all tin, and have bibs to tie around their necks. They were too old for bibs. But then on the first morning, Beryl’s milk cup slipped from her hands and spilled, the first casualty of the children’s war at Greenway. We are glad of the bibs.

After breakfast we march on the lavs again, this time with tooth brushes. Sticky hands are washed, and back in the room, heads checked for lice and heads brushed. The girls, anyway. Gigi has care of the boys. When the girls are sorted into their siren suits for play and taken outside, the boys are not quite as neat. Buttons missed on their coats, socks slipping down, hair gone uncombed.

Gigi is as sleek and fashionable as ever, her dark hair tidy. A breeze rushing up the hill from the River Dart will make my cheeks as pink as a farmer’s and my hair fly from its pins but she’s as elegant as a cover of a magazine. I never saw the like in a nurse.

But there’s no time for it. If I’m to get Mrs. Arbuthnot’s good word back to Matron and begin real nursing again, I can only concern myself with the children. And how do I do that, when the Arbuthnots have brought us only up the river from the Channel and France? To a large white house on the top of a hill. They’ve had aeroplanes overhead, bombs up the hill. This is no place for children escaping the war.

There’s nothing for it. We’ll have to run the air raid trials, urging the older children and toting the small ones down from the nursery to the drawing room, far from the roof where an incendiary might start a fire. Timed and timed again, then gas mask play to get the children accustomed to wearing them. The children will play war and houses in their masks; they don’t mind. The babies will go into their bags, and Gigi and I will pump the air in, and—is Gigi up to this? This Gigi, so called, what sort is she? I’ll have to have the spirit, perhaps for both of us, or we’ll all come to calamity. It all must go well, just as planned, if we’re to survive. Just as planned, if I’m to have what I want.

Death at Greenway, A Novel of Suspense
Genre: Historical
Release: October 2021
Purchase Link

From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.

Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House—the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie—in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca’s Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz.

Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder. The biggest mystery might be the other nurse, Gigi, who is like no one Bridey has ever met. Chasing ten young children through the winding paths of the estate grounds might have soothed Bridey’s anxieties and grief—if Greenway were not situated so near the English Channel and the rising aggressions of the war.

When a body washes ashore near the estate, Bridey is horrified to realize this is not a victim of war, but of a brutal killing. As the local villagers look among themselves, Bridey and Gigi discover they each harbor dangerous secrets about what has led them to Greenway. With a mystery writer’s home as their unsettling backdrop, the young women must unravel the truth before their safe haven becomes a place of death . . .

About the author
Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar and Agatha award-nominated and Anthony Award- and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She co-chairs the Chicago readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference (formerly Murder and Mayhem in Chicago) and is a former national president of Sisters in Crime. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their mixed breed, half-monster puppy, Clementine.

All comments are welcomed.