The Cliff’s Edge

In July 1919, Elizabeth “Bess” Crawford—fresh home from war service and restless in peacetime—accepts a favor request that lands her at Lady Beatrice Linton’s grand Yorkshire neighbors. What begins as post-surgical nursing turns into a crisis when a friend of the family, Frederick Caldwell, dies after a fall from a rocky outcropping, leaving Gordon Neville injured and accused.

As an abrasive inspector presses for an arrest, Bess is pulled deeper into the household’s secrets: old romantic grievances, village resentments toward returning officers, and a brutal second murder that makes the estate feel cursed. When Bess herself is pushed down the stairs, the case pivots from suspicion and rumor to proof—revealing a desperate veteran’s revenge, a widow’s manipulation, and a companion’s decades-long silence about a crime that reaches back to colonial South Africa and explains a painful rift at Bess’s own home.

• Listeners who enjoy atmospheric post–WWI British mysteries with a strong professional heroine and tight clue-based plotting.
• Fans of “country house + village secrets” investigations where social class, war trauma, and family loyalties complicate the truth.
• Readers following the Bess Crawford series, especially those interested in revelations that connect Bess’s present to long-buried past crimes.

Charles Todd is the pen name of a mother-and-son writing team, bestselling for the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries and the Bess Crawford mysteries, known for historically grounded post–World War I crime fiction.