Words on Wednesday: Agatha Christie's _There is a Tide_

This is a definitely historical story......
  It begins in a London club during a blitz raid.
  The critical plot point is another blitz action, the bombing of Gordon Cloade's household, which killed nearly all inhabitants.  Including Gordon..
   Throughout, we hear of ration books (how CAN one plan a wedding with only one's own ration coupons????), shortages of everything, economic stress, and the rootlessness of demobbed solders.  Much is made of a certain type of soldier, valiant beyond all measure, essential in a crisis, who cannot adapt to peaceful civilian life.
  One of the characters, Rowley Cloade, is a farmer.  The government needed him to stay on that farm.  His partner served instead, and was killed almost immediately. Rowley is understandably feeling guilty, like he missed out on a birthright.
  The fact that his fiancee is a returning WREN doesn't help his attitude. How is she gonna want to stay on the farm after she's seen the world?

  The specific storyline adds to the hardships experienced by the Cloade family.  The deceased, big brother Gordon, was a wealthy, childless widower - who had spent his entire life training his family to depend on him and his money.
  He'd seen to that in his will.  But, weeks before he died in the blitz, he'd remarried.  A young Irish widow, in her mid-twenties.  And Gordon died before he could make a new will - wife gets everything, family left out in the cold.
  Only her death can help the suddenly unanchored family.
  Oh, yes, it's a Poirot story, which was good, but primarily i liked the characters and the intense reality of the timeframe.

Wikipedia on this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_at_the_Flood
An interesting blog i found while working on this:
 https://classicmystery.blog/2012/03/29/taken-at-the-flood-aka-there-is-a-tide-by-agatha-christie/