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Murder mystery at a key moment in history.
(This review is based on a review .pdf from the publisher.)
A wartime wedding at the Actor’s Church in Covent Garden is followed by what a popular spiritualist has suggested will be a turning point in the war, and it is indeed the heaviest air-raid of The Blitz. (From that point on, Hitler needed the resources for other things. Even before that, every major strategic objective he had met, involved the sacrifice of something he would need for his next objective. For example: Norway was captured swiftly, but holding and controlling Norway took many more troops than her surprise capture and tens of thousands of them were still there when Berlin fell.)
Josephine and other central characters of the series are already booked to travel to North Wales on secret business for the National Gallery immediately after the wedding, but the loss of friends and property in that ferocious bombing raid leads them to take others with them for a few days respite. The secret plan involves a slate mine and hundreds of priceless works of art; the unplanned interruption is a long-dead (female) body which falls into the cavern destined to protect the artworks for the duration of the war. All sorts of secrets and past traumas emerge, bit by bit, from the local community; the clever people from London struggle to fit them together, bit by bit into an explanation and an identity for the dead body.
Those traumatised by the raid on London find calm and healing not just in the Welsh countryside, but also in the architecture set in that countryside as a labour of love by a talented man and in the many paintings being hidden underneath a mountain. But there are deep stresses and strains in the local community which eventually come to a head back in London, in a most unexpected denouement. The social fissures include linguistic division and injustice, a strong class divide and that between the artistic and the strictly practical, but the widest gulf is between spiritualism and the “Chapel” which in Wales, as in rural England, was a very different thing to the Church of England.
Each of the factions has its own code of conduct; but the lesbian sleuth of a certain age faction is but two persons; Josephine Tey and her lover, Marta. Marta confesses that when her inquiries led her to seek answers in a remote farmhouse used as a lodging and workplace by male art conservators, she impulsively washed the men's dinner plates for them while she was at it! The firm but gentle admonishment Marta receives for this breach of principled lesbianism contrasts with the harshness of disputes between the spiritualists and the Chapel-goers, but also with the Chapel-goers’ humiliation of their own transgressors and angry struggles within the spirit world itself.
The Voices of The Dead by Nicola Upton is published by Faber and Faber on the 5th of November 2026 It is the 12th novel in the Josephine Tey mystery series.
