The Rose Arbor is a captivating and highly engrossing historical fiction/mystery. Rhys Bowen does a great job in immersing you in a different time and place with her prose. I was fully invested in the characters and their journeys, and I actually enjoyed my commutes to and from work because I got to delve into this story again and again.

In 1943, the residents of a small English village named Tydeham were asked to evacuate, so that the military could use their village for wartime exercises. The evacuation was rather frantic; in most cases, people didn’t want to leave their homes. There’s a beautifully heart-breaking moment where a woman insists on having a final cup of tea in her own kitchen before she has to get on the van to leave, and her husband tells her they unfortunately don’t have the time. In all the hubbub, three young girls end up missing, and years later, only one of their bodies has been found.

Flash forward to 1968. Liz Houghton hates her job as an obituary writer for a London newspaper, so when her roommate, Marisa, a police officer, mentions travelling to Dorset to pursue a lead about a young girl’s disappearance, Liz jumps at the chance for a more interesting story. While in Dorset, Liz finds herself drawn to the nearby village of Tydeham. Even though her father insists they’ve never lived there, and Liz would only have been two when the village was evacuated for the war, something about the village seems familiar, and a hunch leads to the discovery of a body behind an old manor house. It isn’t one of the missing girls, but rather the skeleton of a young woman.

Whose body is it? How did Liz know it was there? How, if ever, is it connected to the missing young girls, both from the 1940s and from the present day? Bowen packs her narrative with lots of mysteries, and somehow manages to make all the disparate threads come together by the end.

However, the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. More than the mystery of how Liz is connected to the village of Tydeham, it was her relationships that intrigued me. I was drawn in by the romance developing between her and James, the young man whose family owned the manor where the body was found, and I thought James’ father was charming. Liz’s mother had advanced dementia, and in the few scenes she appeared, Liz’s love for her and sorrow for her current condition really shone through. And Liz’s brigadier father was just shady from the get-go; the way he was portrayed on the page, I imagined far worse secrets than what was eventually revealed.

Adding an extra layer is the stories, mostly lost, of the people of Tydeham. The book starts with the residents of this town reacting to the news that they would have to evacuate, and as much as I got pulled in by the story of Liz in 1968, I also couldn’t help wishing that we’d gotten to spend more time in Tydeham in the 1940s. By the end of the novel, much of the village’s role was reduced to providing plot points for the central mystery, and while I can see the benefit in terms of keeping the storytelling tight, I also couldn’t help but feel the sense of loss that Liz tried to capture in her obituary for the town. Those people mattered, and while it’s certainly realistic that within the context of Liz’s story, so many of these minor characters’ stories would have been lost to time, Bowen has managed to make us care enough to wish this weren’t so.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Limited for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.