World War I made "shell shock" a household term, as countless soldiers returned home emotionally broken by the horrors of chemical and trench warfare. Laurence Bartram, the hero of Elizabeth Speller's debut mystery, is a relatively lucky British war veteran: He's mentally and financially stable enough to pursue a quiet postwar life researching London churches. But even so, he's a widower who can't sleep easy. The war's "aftershocks rumbled on and on," Speller writes. "Peace had nothing to do with signatures and seals on a paper."

So while Laurence is no sleuth, he's motivated to investigate the suicide of his schoolmate John Emmett, another war vet; he has both the time and an obsession with what war does to one's head. Working with a few scraps of evidence, he uncovers a mutinous incident that reveals the ugliness, violence and psychological degradations of war, as well as a British culture eager to suppress it. Speller has clearly done her research on what we once called the Great War and what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Frustratingly, though, her narrative can be slow and convoluted. A large cast of characters swim through the story, and the most dramatic wartime moments are told in dialogue by people who have heard the stories secondhand, muting their power. Speller smartly critiques the stoic British demeanor that left many suffering in silence, but in prose that itself has too much of a stiff upper lip.