Winter 1946

One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.

#TheMidnightMan X(Twitter) @jjulieanderson @HobeckBooks @ZooloosBT #ZooloosBookTours #blogtour #booktwitter 
Instagram @zooloosbooktours #bookstagram

Faye Smith, the hospital canteen manager, joins forces with a mysterious new arrival, Eleanor Peveril, to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue – The Midnight Man.

BEWARE THE DARKNESS BENEATH

My Review

The Midnight Man is a book in which we have two female protagonists, both very different and supremely likeable. First we have Faye Smith, the hospital canteen manager at the South London Hospital for Women & Children, (the SLH**) who is devastated when one of the nurses is found murdered, behind a locked door. She is not going to let this go without finding out the truth. The police have decided it was a vagrant who killed her, and are not interested in any new information.

**The SLH was unusual in that it was run entirely by women, for women, the only one of its kind as far as I know.

Then we have new arrival Eleanor Peveril, beautiful, well-educated and mysterious. She appears to have fallen on hard times and Faye takes her in, finds her accommodation with nurse Beryl, and a job in the canteen. But Ellie has recently returned from working as a legal clerk at the Nuremberg trials, and knows that this job is only a stop gap.

Soon the two women join forces to investigate the murder of the nurse, even though it not only puts their position at the hospital at risk, but also their lives. They must examine their own personal demons and make decisions that will change them forever.

In The Midnight Man Faye’s younger sister Phoebe is hospitalised with advanced TB and the family have to raise the money to pay for her treatment and make sure she is not sent to a sanatorium, as they could be dreadful places. This was of course just before the NHS came into being, and just as the trial for a brand new drug (streptomycin) began.

My father had TB immediately after the war, and while he survived, this was before streptomycin had been developed, and we know his TB lay dormant until his death in 2000 when he had to be isolated because it had returned. By then he was very ill and I suppose he was vulnerable. My mother also had TB in the 1970s, but of course she could have the drug.

What makes this book so fascinating, is that while it revolves around a murder, it gives us an insight into the lives of independent women just after the war ended. Women did all the jobs men did during the war, but once the war ended, they were supposed to return to their mundane lives as homemakers and nothing else. Not that having a husband and children was a bad thing, but there were no openings for women to have a family AND a career as we know it now. And any woman who didn’t want to get married was considered very strange indeed.

Many thanks to @ZooloosBT  for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

Julie Anderson is the CWA Dagger listed author of three Whitehall thrillers and a short series of historical adventure stories for young adults. Before becoming a crime fiction writer, she was a senior civil servant, working across a variety of departments and agencies, including the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Unlike her protagonists, however, she doesn’t know where (all) the bodies are buried. She writes crime fiction reviews for Time and Leisure Magazine and is a co-founder and Trustee of the Clapham Book Festival.

She lives in south London where her latest crime fiction series is set, returning to her first love of writing historical fiction with The Midnight Man, to be published by Hobeck.

Julie’s Links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julieandersonwriter/
Twitter : https://twitter.com/jjulieanderson
Website : https://julieandersonwriter.com/

Book Links
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209933310-the-midnight-man
Buy Links : https://mybook.to/midnightman-zbt