To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear

To Die But Once: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear --- 325 pages including Acknowledgements.

Entry 14 in Winspear's excellent historical mystery series that began in 1913, just before the start of World War I, and has now reached the spring of 1940. War has been declared, British troops have landed in France and Belgium, and Hitler's army is advancing.

At home, the British are making feverish preparations to defend themselves against invasion, and experiencing that eerie calm before the storm feeling that  nothing much is happening --- yet. The owner of the local pub asks Maisie Dobbs to locate his son Joe, a fifteen-year-old apprentice painter away from home for the first time, working on a big government contract at the new defensive airfields springing up all along the south coast.  The painters are covering the buildings at the airfields with a fire-retardant emulsion to protect against German bomb attacks, but something in the paint has been causing Joe to experience sick headaches. And he hasn't called home or written for over a week.

Maisie is glad to help, but soon discovers that although Joe's gone missing none of his workmates have noticed anything amiss. As an increasingly concerned Maisie pursues her inquiry the country is preoccupied with a possible enemy invasion as rumors spread that the British expeditionary force is being pushed back by the advancing Germans and is stranded on the beaches of France.

The British government issues a call for every civilian with a boat to join the British Navy's effort to evacuate the troops now trapped and under vicious aerial attack. In the middle of all of these alarms, Maisie discovers another boy has gone missing, her friend Priscilla's middle son, and Maisie's own godson. Timothy and his friend Gordon have slipped away to take Gordon's father's boat and join the effort to evacuate the troops. 

Winspear successfully combines history and mystery in a book that brings home on a personal level the terrible costs of war. The book is based on the wartime experiences of Winspear's own family during World Wars I and II, and dedicated to her father, a World War II veteran.

If you've seen the award-winning 2017 film Dunkirk, written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan, or enjoyed the Foyle's War series on PBS, this book will appeal.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the starred review from Library Journal.

Click HERE to read a brief interview with the author published in the New York Times.

Click HERE to read the entry on the Evacuation of Dunkirk from Wikipedia. 





   

In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear

In This Grave Hour: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear --- 333 pages

In the thirteenth entry in this mystery series, the world is once again on the threshold of another "Great War," the second such in the lives of Maisie and her compatriots, who still bear the scars of the first on their bodies and minds.

Maisie has re-established her business as a psychologist and investigator, joining forces once again with her colleagues Billy and Sandra. She has also been drawn back into her relationship with Priscilla Partridge, a friend since college days, and Priscilla's husband and three sons, who consider Maisie their aunt. Maisie and Priscilla were nurses during World War I; Douglas Partridge lost an arm in that war, and all three of Priscilla's beloved brothers were killed in action.

Now the whole nightmare looms again, as Maisie is reluctantly recruited by the British Secret Service to look into the troubling death of a Belgian refugee from the last war, who stayed on in Britain, married an English woman, and raised a family.  Frederick Addens was found dead near his workplace just after picking up his pay packet, and Scotland Yard has written off the case as a robbery gone bad. But evidence at the scene suggests Addens was on his knees when he was shot execution style, in the back of the head.

Francesca Thomas, one of Maisie's contacts with the Secret Service, was herself a Belgian Resistance leader in the last war, and knew Addens as a boy, when he first arrived with other refugees. She's not satisfied with Scotland Yard's explanation, and wants Maisie to look further into the matter.

Maisie agrees to take the case, but suspects Thomas is not telling her everything she knows. As she begins her investigation, she uncovers other execution-style murders. The victims are all either former Belgian refugees or people who worked to resettle Belgian refugees.

Another fine historical mystery from Jacqueline Winspear that brings the past convincingly to life.

Click HERE for a review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE for a review from Kirkus.

Click HERE for a review from the New York Times Book Review.

Click HERE for a review from the New York Journal of Books.

A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

A Dangerous Place: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear --- 378 pages

Four years after she set sail for India, leaving everyone and everything she knew behind, Maisie Dobbs reluctantly answers a summons home to England from her refuge in the hills of Darjeeling.  

Maisie has found love, happiness, fulfillment —and seen it all torn from her in an instant. Now all she wants is for the pain to stop. On the ship bound for home, Maisie realizes she's not yet ready to face her unquiet ghosts.  Against advice, she disembarks at Gibraltar where she hopes to find anonymity. Instead she finds the British garrison town flooded with refugees fleeing the brutal civil war in Spain, where the Nationalists (aided by Fascist Germany and Italy) are trying to overthrow the young Republic (supported by Communist Russia and the International Brigades --- volunteers from Europe and the United States). With war just across the border, Gibraltar has also attracted spies, agent provocateurs, and profiteers.

It is indeed a most dangerous place, as Maisie discovers when, soon after her arrival, she stumbles over the body of a murdered man on the grounds of the exclusive Ridge Hotel. Sebastian Babayoff was a photographer and a member of Gibraltar’s Sephardic Jewish community. He is also rumored to be a Communist and a Republican partisan. When the local police seem ready to write off the murder, Maisie's investigative instincts are aroused. Trying simultaneously to evade the surveillance of the British Secret Service, Maisie finds herself in uncertain company, navigating deep waters of  international intrigue on “the Rock,”

At a crossroads between her past and her future, Maisie must choose a new direction for herself even as the world marches inexorably towards another war.

Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear

Leaving Everything Most Loved: A Maisie Dobbs Novel ---339 pages

In 1933, two months after a murdered Indian woman named Usha Pramal was found dumped in the Grand Surrey Canal in Camberwell, the victim's anguished brother arrives in London and retains Maisie Dobbs to investigate the death, since Scotland Yard has made no progress in solving the murder.  Indeed, it appears to Maisie that the police have conducted only the most cursory investigation at all.

But when Maisie begins to look into the matter a second woman --- another Indian woman staying in the same hostel who was friends with Usha --- is murdered in the same way just hours before she was due to meet with Maisie and reveal what she knew about Usha's activities and acquaintances in the weeks before her death.

As part of her investigation Maisie finds herself talking to other Indian immigrants living in London, and becomes more and more attracted to the history, culture and spirituality of India. All of the success she has achieved, the place she has made for herself, and the relationships she has established, though satisfying are not enough any more. She has a hunger to see more, to learn and to stretch herself in new and different directions. And so, as she pursues her case she also pursues an important decision: is it time to leave behind everything she most loves --- to break her heart so that she can open herself to new experiences and possibilities?