She Came Back

by Patricia Wentworth

Ebook, 2011

Library's rating

Library's review

It's 1940, and beautiful, newly married heiress Anne Joyce quarrels with her husband and hies off to France to help some relatives who have gotten trapped there in the German occupation. Husband Philip comes after her, and in the late-night confusion of a German ambush on the beach where they are

attempting to escape, Anne is killed.

Or is she? Three years later she comes strolling back into Philip's life in England, swearing that he mistook her cousin for herself and buried the wrong woman. Everyone is dumbstruck and seems to believe her without many reservations, except Philip. But even he is forced to concede the truth when she reveals knowledge about their honeymoon that no one but Anne could know ...

It all sounds a bit Days of Our Lives, doesn't it? A nice soapy plot complete with mistaken identities, the dead coming back to life, complicated family relations, romantic entanglements, and a soupçon of espionage to flavor the ~~soup~~ soap opera. It takes all of Miss Silver's ingenuity to untangle the mess, which she gets drawn into after encountering a peripheral player in the drama. (And she meets the woman randomly on the train, of course, where she seems to spend most of her time just riding back and forth and soliciting clients. Such a strange little woman!)

I'm not afraid to admit that I had trouble following the intricacies of the family lineage that led to their being an Anne Jocelyn (beautiful, rich, maybe dead) and her cousin Annie Joyce (beautiful, poor, maybe alive). Deciding to pretend it was a television soap opera that I was tuning in to in the middle of the fifth season helped reconcile me to the confusion, and after that I was able to enjoy Miss Silver's setting everyone straight. The eventual solution seemed blindingly obvious to me, but I guess if you were living through it — and a World War at the same time — you can be excused for being gobsmacked by the whole thing.

N.B. The original UK title is The Traveller Returns, if you're looking for it across the pond. For a change I prefer the US title, though neither of them are brilliant.

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Description

Fiction. Mystery. HTML:In World War II�??era England, it seems a noblewoman may have come back from the dead Anne Jocelyn and a friend were killed trying to escape the first German assault on France. Before leaving to join the war, it was up to Anne's husband, Phillip, to bury her body for burial. That was three years ago�??and now Anne has returned to England. Looking and talking exactly like Phillip's wife, the woman insists he mistook her friend's body for her own and buried it by mistake. After three years hiding from the Nazis, Anne has finally escaped and come back to him. Phillip doesn't believe her, but as far as she's concerned Anne Jocelyn's riches are her own. Only the brilliant governess-turned-sleuth Miss Maud Silver will be able to divine the truth… (more)