A Man in Uniform

I have no idea where A Man in Uniform came from. I found it in my nightstand recently (has it been there for years?) and it sounded interesting. It's historical fiction, which you may have gathered from my last post that I'm more inclined to like than regular fiction, so I figured it was about time to actually read it.

The plot centers around the Dreyfus Affair (Wikipedia has a nice little synopsis of it), which is known as much today, at least in the U.S., for being the impetus for Emile Zola's famous J'accuse as for anything else. The idea is a mysterious woman comes to a relatively small-time lawyer whose family has extensive military connections, pleads that Dreyfus is innocent and charges him with not only gaining an appeal for Dreyfus, but with finding the real spy. Honestly, the lengths to which the lawyer, Dubon, goes seem rather improbable at times, but this is a fast-moving, well-written mystery that is as much about Parisian society at the turn of the 20th century as anything else. Kate Taylor's writing is a pleasure to read and her plot twists and turns through the final pages. I would classify it as a "beach read" and recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, and especially, a good mystery.