The World War I Novels

About The World War I Novels

Anne Perry's five-book World War I series follows the Reavley siblings -- Joseph, a Cambridge theology don who becomes an army chaplain; Matthew, an intelligence officer; and their sisters Judith and Hannah -- across the length of the war, beginning when their parents are killed in a car crash that turns out to be murder, tied to a mysterious document their father was carrying that could have prevented the war entirely. That inciting mystery (the identity and aims of a shadowy figure known as the Peacemaker) runs underneath all five books, but each volume is also its own self-contained story set against a different phase and front of the war, from the trenches and field hospitals to the home front and its own crimes and betrayals.

Where Perry's Victorian detective series treat murder as a puzzle to be solved within a stable social order, the World War I novels use the same instinct for investigation against a backdrop where that order is being destroyed in real time -- grief, propaganda, cowardice, and genuine heroism sit much closer together here than in her London drawing-room mysteries, and the mystery plotting is in service of a larger meditation on what the war cost a single family and a generation.

How to read this series

Read the five books in publication order -- No Graves As Yet, Shoulder the Sky, Angels in the Gloom, At Some Disputed Barricade and We Shall Not Sleep -- as they form one continuous story following the Reavley family and the Peacemaker mystery from the outbreak of war in 1914 through to the Armistice in 1918. No familiarity with Perry's other series is required; this is a self-contained saga distinct from both the William Monk and Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Victorian mysteries.