The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes (2018)

Recommended by my audio bookstore owner, I didn't really get what I was reading until the end, when there was an explanatory note and an interview with the author. First of all, Jessica Fellowes, who worked with, I want to say uncle, Julian Fellowes and wrote companion books to the Downton Abbey series about life in those times. This is her first try at fiction, though it is based on the actual murder of  WWI nurse Florence Nightingale Shore that was never solved. It turns out that the Mitford family too is real and that the Mitford sisters were well known in the between war years and that Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) became a well know writer. Here in this book she is still a girl, just about to turn 18. I did try to figure out if Florence Nightingale Shore (I kept hearing it as Shaw) was real, as I had only heard of her famous aunt - but Florence Nightingale developed nursing in earlier wars and died in 1910. This book happens in 1920-21.

Our two main characters are Louise Cannon and Guy Sullivan, both from the working class. She is the daughter of a washerwoman whose father has died and a nasty uncle has moved in to their apartment. When he tries to use her to pay off his debts, she jumps off a train and is helped by one of the young railway security people - Gus, who regrets not having been to war because of his poor eyesight. He helps her get to an important interview. Right after that Florence Nightingale Shore, a highly respected nurse during the war, is found battered on a train and she dies a day later. Gus becomes obsessed with the murder and spends the rest of the book looking for the possible murderer., even when the case gets officially closed. He feels that if he could solve this, he could move up to a more responsible job.

Louise gets the position as helper to the nanny of the five Mitford daughters. Nancy, being the oldest, considers her a friend at times, though the difference in their status does not make that always easy. Nancy is an energetic girl who wants adventure, so when she reads about the murder, she is intrigued, pulling Louise into her musings about what could have happened.  Nancy also wants to be grown up, so she convinces Louise to accompany her to a ball that she is too young to attend. There they meet Roland, who has come back from the war and Nancy becomes quite besotted with him. Nancy and Louise find a few clues that they pass on to Gus, who likes Louise. The mystery keeps giving them excuses to write or talk and meet, though Louise can't even imagine that she could have a future with him.

We get to meet a lot of characters from all walks of life and see their joys and sorrows, but for all the times are changing. England is recovering from the war, where it lost so many of its men, but the changes in technology allow the lower classes to hope for lives better than that of their parents, and as we saw in Downton Abbey, the lives of the upper classes change too, Fellowes said in her interview that she has based her novel on a lot of real facts, for instance, she read all the descriptions of the inquiry into the murder, as reported in the papers. The Mitford sisters also wrote a lot to each other, which has provided her with enough details to intersperse with her own imagination. The servants are fictitious, but based on people in similar roles.

Turns out this is going to be a series of murder mysteries, and I see that another one has already come out, so we should be seeing the Mitfords, Louise and Gus again in the future.