April Smith is perhaps best known for her Ana Grey mysteries, but her new novel, set in the 1930s, is a departure. It's the story of four Gold Star mothers who travel, at the U.S. government's expense, to France to visit the graves of their sons who died in World War I. Here's how it begins:

Cora Blake was certainly not planning on going to Paris that spring. Or ever in her lifetime. She was the librarian in a small town on the tip of an island off the coast of Maine, which didn't mean she'd never traveled. She did spend two years at Colby College in Waterville and visited family in Portland, went to Arizona once, and if you count yachting, knew most of the New England coast. Her mother had been the great adventurer, married to a sea captain who'd taken her all around the world. Cora was born off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, which might account for her venturesome spirit, but now she roamed only in books. Summer people from North Carolina and Boston would stop by the quaint old library building to chat, and wonder how she could stand to live in such a tiny place with those terrible winters.

"I have everything I want right on the island," she's say. "We're so off the beaten path, you've got to be satisfied with the way it is."

Since the crash of 'twenty-nine the county had stopped paying her salary, but Cora kept on librarying anyway, two days and one morning a week, for free. She did it for the sociability and out of duty to her readers, but she was as hard up for cash as anybody. That's why when the whistle started blowing at the break of dawn out at Healy's cannery, it sounded to Cora Blake like Gabriel himself swinging out on the horn.

It was 5:00 a.m. in the pit of February. The cannery had been silent for more than two weeks, but now the whistle was loud and clear, piercing the bleat of the foghorn. Wake up! it shrilled. There's work! and throughout the village women rose up out of warm beds wondering how much work there would be and how long they might be gone doing it.

From "A Star for Mrs. Blake," by April Smith, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Used with permission.