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Blue Damask, is the story of an Austrian woman who finds the strength and power to overcome uncontrollable events by using her wits, and sometimes her wiles, to outsmart her adversaries by using their own weaknesses against them.
Elsa Schluss spent the Great War in a field hospital as a surgical nurse, sewing together the mangled bodies of soldiers. She worked long hours under trying conditions without complaint, yet doctors considered her a menial worker, not a professional woman with valuable skills. After the war, Elsa entered the University of Vienna to study psychology. She had learned that many wounded soldiers fell apart when the stitches were removed. Now she continues to find it difficult to be taken seriously by the men who rule academia, and her troubles are compounded when her advisor tells her he does not think her dissertation will be accepted as written.
The story opens as an Englishman in a straightjacket is dumped to the floor of her advisor's clinic. The British government is so eager to have this man lucid and functioning rationally that they have sent Field Agent Marshall to get it done any way he can. The patient must be brought back from the brink of insanity while traveling by train and ship and car from Vienna to Damascus.
Marshall hires Elsa to take on this challenge, and what at first seems like an excellent case study for her thesis, turns into a wild adventure in the wastelands of Syria during the violent Arab Revolt of 1921. More is at stake than a student's paper, a man's sanity, and a field agent's career. Elsa finds that she is in the midst of multiple mysteries and she must use her wits to sort them out in order to keep herself and her patient alive and get them both safely back to Vienna.
I like how one of my reviewers described her: "the reader is treated to watching Elsa's transformation from a prim, exquisite psychologist to a ready-for-anything heroine covered with dirt and blood and packing a semi-automatic pistol and willing to use it."
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