«Dead Ground in Between» by Maureen Jennings

It's late 1942; the war is still raging and DI Tom Tyler is settling into his placement in Ludlow, Shropshire, a small town full of Italian PoWs from a nearby internment camp, brought to work the land. Fraternizing is forbidden but, as Tyler knows only too well, the human heart has a way of crossing boundaries. Then a old man is found murdered, and Tyler suspects that the two evacuee children who found the body are not telling him the whole truth…