from Mary:

I’m re-reading the Maisie Dobbs mystery series using e-audiobooks, and they’re just as good the second time around. There are 10 books in the series. Maisie is a “Psychologist and Investigator” in post-WWI England, a time of great social change following an especially terrible war. Well-written and thought provoking. ( )

Als een 32 jarige vrouw verdwijnt, geeft haar vader detective Maisie Dobbs opdracht haar te vinden en thuis te brengen.

Though I wasn’t overly impressed with the first book in the Maisie Dobbs series, I thought I’d give the second book a chance. I think I will be giving up on the series because this installment was not an improvement.

Maisie is hired by Joseph Waite, a wealthy grocery magnate, to find his daughter Charlotte who has once again fled her gilded cage. Locating her whereabouts becomes more pressing when Maisie discovers that three of Charlotte’s friends have recently met violent deaths. Is Charlotte the murderer or will she be the next victim?

Characters introduced in the first book reappear: Billy Beale, Lady Compton, Maurice Blanche, and Frankie Dobbs. Billy and Frankie both end up needing help but, as expected, their problems are solved fairly easily because of Maisie’s connections. New characters are introduced of course. One that bothered me is Charlotte. Her behaviour, given the circumstances, doesn’t always make sense.

Maisie continues to be too perfect. What irritated me this time is her total control; she never gets flustered and always has control of her emotions. She needs some flaws other than not eating enough and having tendrils of her hair always coming loose. What is also unbelievable is her use of empathy to investigate: She can sense auras and thereby knows not to leave a room because a clue is waiting to be found? This weird supernatural vibe means that she actually finds clues without any clever sleuthing. Isn’t she an investigator/psychologist, not a psychic?

The mystery is lacklustre to say the least. The title of the novel is so obviously a clue; given the setting of the novels, I immediately thought of the white feather campaign. The mystery would have been solved very early on if the author didn’t keep the reader in the dark. For instance, Maisie picks up two items in two different places but what she pockets is not identified until later. Keeping evidence from readers means this is not a fair-play mystery.

The pace can only be called glacial. Even when Maisie has definite clues as to Charlotte’s whereabouts, it takes her days to check if her suspicions are correct. I don’t need an action-packed plot to keep my interest, but I definitely expect something a little less sedate in a mystery, however cozy it is supposed to be.

This novel is set in 1930, twelve years after the end of World War I, yet all Maisie’s cases relate to events in the war? I understand the lasting impact of that horrific war, but not all crimes committed years later were connected to it. And why, if the murderer is motivated by events during the war, does s/he act only a dozen years later?

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) or substack (https://doreenyakabuski.substack.com/) for over 1,100 of my book reviews. ( )

What a wonderful series this is. I can't wait to get my hands on the next installment. ( )

Another great installment in this series, this one follows Maisie into the Great Depression in London's streets. And as with the inaugural book, we see the fall-out from the Great War all these years later.

This time, Maisie and her assistant Billy Beale are invited to the grand home of a self-made man, James Waite. His daughter has run away, again, and he insists that Charlotte be returned at once. Part of Maisie's concern when she takes the case is why would a father insist that his 34 year old daughter come back to live at home, especially as she is well-heeled and should have made a good match long ago.

As Maisie's MG takes her around on her sleuthing, we also take a look at how her relationship with her father, Frank, has become difficult. Frank is working on the grounds of Chelston with Lady Rowena's prize mare when he slips and falls and breaks both his legs. Maisie realizes that they have not spoken much since she has arrived at adulthood and is a wise enough woman to know it's time to address this issue.

The main mystery of the story, though, is why Charlotte has gone into hiding in Camden Convent, with which Maisie is familiar, and how three of her friends from her finishing-school days have all died by a murderer or by suicide. Of course Detective Inspector Stratton thinks that he has found the killer, the estranged husband of one of the murdered women, except that Maisie thinks he might be mistaken.

In a blend of wisdom, intuition, and a bit of "reading" of the locations where the women have died, Maisie realizes there is some connection between all four beyond their finishing-school days. And that somehow, it is connected with the Great War and the grocer's empire that Charlotte's father created from the ground up. What that connection is gets revealed at the tail end in a most logical and tragic way. ( )