The second in Laura Wilson's excellent wartime detective series moves Ted Stratton on from the beginning of the blitz in the 1940 - told in Stratton's War - into 1944, as the war moves agonisingly slowly towards its end.
In 1944 the new terror in the skies above London is the unmanned Doodlebug rocket raining death and destruction on an exhausted, hungry and thoroughly war-weary population. Following a deadly strike near his Tottenham home, Stratton pulls a woman from the rubble of her destroyed house. The newly homeless woman is taken in by Stratton's sister-in-law Donald and her husband, and her brutalised mental state quickly becomes a problem for the extended family.
Things are no easier for Stratton at the Saville Row nick. He is called in to upon to look into the murder of a doctor from the nearby Middlesex hospital who has been left dead at an adjacent bomb site. When a nurse at the hospital suffers a similar fate, Stratton is under intense pressure to find the killer or killers and save the hospital from both falling into panic and the embarrassment of scandal.
At the centre of the web of death Stratton finds a beautiful nurse, a dashing doctor (whom the reader knows is an impostor), crusty administrators and strict, businesslike Sisters. And if all that sounds a little like the recipe for Carry on Matron... it is actually the foundation on which Wilson skilfully builds an atmospheric and compelling thriller.
At the heart of the story is a quest for identity. For Stratton, course, this is a fairly conventional hunt for the identity of a killer. But for others it is vastly more complicated. From the rubble of her former life, Mrs Ingram, saved by Stratton, cannot recognise her husband and falls into a paranoiac hell, where there are only fleeting glimpses of her former life. For the impostor Doctor Dacre there is a relentless search for the man he would be. For Jenny Stratton, there is a nagging fear that her evacuated children - now 16 and 12 - will not fit back into their London lives should they ever be able to return from their Suffolk exile.
It is fascinating stuff, as Wilson examines the war's impact on her characters. For Doctor Dacre the fog of war, the rubble and the smoke, provide a perfect screen for his ambition as he is able to slide through the cracks. For other characters, the War is an additional heavy burden they carry on their shoulders, making life so much harder.
The wartime canvas is cleverly constructed, and in particular the daily life at the Middlesex hospital gives a deep and vivid insight into its impact both physical and psychological, while scenes as simple as Jenny cooking dinner for Ted also exposes privations that are utterly unrecognisable today.
And so An Empty Death will delight those who like their thrillers raw and with a painful twist, while anyone with an interest in how the war impacted lives will also find much here. Bravo Laura Wilson. Here's to another Stratton soon.