Originally published: London : Constable & Robinson, 2006.

Champagne, northern France, summer 1926. Joe Sandilands is despatched under the auspices of Interpol to Reims where he is to represent British interests in an unusual case. He has been invited to be the guest of a glamorous French war-widow who runs a champagne estate on the Marne. Aline Houdart is determined that Joe should support her claim that a mysterious shell-shocked soldier who has turned up in the local sanatorium without speech or apparent memory is her husband. But there is a strange conflict, the patient has also been claimed by four other people, and then his doctor begins to suspect that he may in fact be an English soldier.

Not AR rated