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Summary
Summary
With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work.
As Maisie discovers, the villagers are bitterly prejudiced against outsiders who flock to Kent at harvest-time even more troubling, they seem possessed by the legacy of a war-time zeppelin raid. Maisie grows increasingly suspicious of a peculiar secrecy that shrouds the village, and ultimately she must draw on all her finely honed skills of detection to solve one of her most intriguing cases. "
Author Notes
Jacqueline Winspear was born in the county of Kent, England. She was educated at the University of London's Institute of Education. After graduation, she worked in academic publishing, in higher education, and in marketing communications in the UK. In 1990, she emigrated to the United States. She was working in business and as a personal/professional coach when she decided to try writing.
Her first novel, Maisie Dobbs, won the Agatha Award for Best First novel, the Macavity Award for Best First Novel, and the Alex Award. She is the author of the Maisie Dobbs Mystery series. She has also won the Agatha Award for Best Novel, the inaugural Sue Feder/Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery, and the Bruce Alexander Award for Best Historical Mystery. Her title, A Dangerous Place, made The New York Times High Profile titles list. Journey to Munich, a book in the Maisie Dobbs Series, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Edgar-finalist Winspear's enjoyable fifth installment in her Maisie Dobbs series (after 2006's Messenger of Truth), the psychologist/investigator digs deep into a village's long-buried secrets. Maisie's benefactor, tycoon James Compton, wants to buy an estate in the bucolic hamlet of Heronsdene, but is wary after a string of mysterious fires. Maisie soon proves Compton's suspicions correct when she encounters the shady current landowner and a vaguely menacing band of Gypsies in town for the seasonal harvest. The locals are also curiously tight-lipped about Heronsdene's wartime tragedy, when a zeppelin raid wiped out a family. Teasing out Heronsdene's secrets will take all the intrepid former nurse's psychological skills and test her ability to navigate between the Gypsy and gorja (non-Gypsy) worlds. Winspear vividly evokes England between the wars, when the old order crumbled and new horizons beckoned working women like her appealing heroine. Even if a few of the plot twists prove predictable, this jaunt back to a bygone era is as satisfying as a spin in Maisie's MG. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Hop-picking season provides a natural cover for Maisie's assistant and part-time hopper, Billy, to infiltrate the pickers' quarters on the Kentish Sandermere Estate and investigate the owner on behalf of a potential buyer. A string of fall fires have plagued the nearby town for years, and yet no one has reported them to the authorities. The town's claim to fame is the wartime story of a zeppelin that crashed on a house, killing the family inside in the ensuing fire. With her psychological insight, honed through several previous investigations, Maisie senses a connection among the zeppelin, the fires, and the pall cast by unpleasant landowner Alfred Sandermere. Like the previous four books in the series, all set in the post-World War I era, this mystery is less about plot than about the psychological makeup of the story's war-scarred, sometimes twisted characters. This time the intrepid Maisie learns that no one is inured to loss, and no revenge is complete. Robert Goddard's In Pale Battalions (1988) is thematically similar, but for a more optimistic view, try Suzanne Arruda's Jade del Cameron series.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Peter Robinson is a good, gray writer who, while lacking a dazzling literary style, brings much sober intelligence and technical skill to the plotting of his police procedural series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and various colleagues in the Eastvale constabulary. While all that well-hammered craftsmanship can feel a bit leaden, Robinson always tells a dandy story. And when he chooses - to challenge himself or merely to sate the current publishing appetite for supersized mysteries with bloated plots - he can even tell two stories at once, as is the case in FRIEND OF THE DEVIL (Morrow, $24.95). The more accessible mystery concerns the brutal rape and murder of 19-year-old Hayley Daniels, a headstrong girl who made a fatal detour into a labyrinth of courtyards and alleyways known as the Maze after a Saturday night pub crawl. As Banks and his team follow the methodical procedures appropriate for an up-to-date police force, Robinson turns the investigation into a variation on the classic locked-room puzzle - a treat for readers capable of looking beyond the back story to focus on the carefully laid out forensic evidence. Less easily resolved, but more original and intriguing, is the parallel investigation conducted by Banks's emotionally twitchy colleague and onetime lover, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot. Annie is looking into the homicide of a woman whose throat was slashed as she sat helplessly in a wheelchair at the edge of a cliff overlooking the North Sea. Once the victim is revealed as a notorious murderer who eluded justice in a previous Robinson novel, the hunt for her killer opens up pitch-black but psychologically rich territory. If the dead woman was, according to Banks, "a complex and interesting killer," what does that make her assassin? Fiendishly clever and efficient, actually, but not as interesting a player as one would expect from Robinson, who reserves the full character treatment for his protagonists. Longtime fans of the series may be pleased with the exacting attention paid to Banks's latest romance, or to the midlife crisis that has Annie hitting the bottle. And as always, Robinson shows compassion for the victims of crime and their survivors. But anyone coming fresh to this series might wonder why he takes only perfunctory interest in the psychology of his villains. Talk about gilding the lily! It was evidently not enough for Maisie Dobbs, the heroine of four thoughtful and moving period mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear, to have studied at Edinburgh's prestigious medical college, served as a battlefield nurse in France during World War I and returned to England to establish a successful practice as a psychologist and private investigator. In AN INCOMPLETE REVENGE (Holt, $24), the already amazing Maisie must now answer the call of heretofore ignored Gypsy blood (on her maternal grandmother's side) to win the trust of a Romany band that has set up camp outside a village in Kent for the 1931 hop-picking season. While investigating incidents of arson and vandalism hindering a client's acquisition of a local brickworks, Maisie unearths secrets that date back to the war. But her detective work, like her prescient sense of the rising mood of Fascism, would be more impressive if she didn't have to dance around a campfire to arrive at her insights. Jonathan Barnes puts a perfectly good Oxford education to mischievous misuse in THE SOMNAMBULIST (Morrow, $23.95), a cheeky tale constructed largely of parts salvaged from the sensationalist novels of the past three centuries. Lurching out into the world like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, the narrative presents itself as a gaslight thriller, à la Wilkie Collins, about a stage magician-cum-detective, Edward Moon, who is investigating the mysterious deaths of London gents slumming in the city's Dickensian fleshpots. Swerving down "grisly and gothic and bizarre" pathways to matters of mind control and mass hysteria, the story embraces the more lurid Grand Guignol style of Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. And once this melodrama descends to the subterranean hell of the London sewers, we are trapped in the supernatural horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. While some readers may be dismayed by the novel's lack of logic or coherence, it doesn't take an English-lit wonk to appreciate the antic mind that would name two of the grotesquely deformed prostitutes in Mrs. Puggsley's brothel after virginal victims of Count Dracula - and find a role in these shenanigans for Coleridge. For all her impressive command of the action in JUDAS HORSE (Knopf, $23.95), April Smith couldn't write a stock thriller if she tried. Even in this feverishly pitched adventure - which finds F.B.I. Special Agent Ana Grey working under cover in Oregon to infiltrate a cell of domestic terrorists posing as animal rights activists - the psychology is too complex and the moral issues are too ambiguous to pass as conventional thriller material. As Ana learns, undercover work brings out "someone criminal, the shadow side of me." Smith also writes too well to settle for the mindless shootouts of a plot geared to summon armed-to-the-teeth SWAT teams at the least provocation. With every dynamic scene, including a wild mustang roundup that thunders right off the page, the reader, like Ana, is reminded of the lost ideals and divided loyalties that make these mortal conflicts so bloody - and so sad. If one of the victims in Peter Robinson's novel was an 'interesting killer,' what does that make her assassin?
Kirkus Review
The Kentish village of Heronsdene is plagued by a series of mysterious fires and burglaries. Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs (Messenger of Truth, 2006, etc.) is hired to find answers by a corporation that plans to buy the brickworks and a large part of the estate owned by unpopular landowner Alfred Sandermere. During hops picking season, the area is crowded with Londoners, whose families have come to work there for generations and enjoy a kind of summer vacation for the poor, and with gypsies. The locals, disliking them all, blame the fires on accidents and the thievery on the incomers. For some reason, however, these confident citizens avoid a piece of unused ground, formerly the home of a Dutch family killed in a World War I raid. Maisie, whose grandmother was a gypsy, gets an inside track when she makes friends in their encampment; her assistant Billy and his family are among the hops pickers. Maisie's domestic life is in turmoil as she faces the death of her wartime love. The upper-class surgeon she worked with at the front has lingered, badly wounded, for years. As she visits the villagers who politely answer her questions, often with lies, she patiently builds a picture of the macabre secret that casts a shadow over the area. A painfully evocative tale of England's struggles with class differences and poverty between the wars, and a clever mystery. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Revenge is a dish served incompletely in Winspear's fifth Maisie Dobbs novel (after Messenger of Truth). This time, Maisie is employed by James Compton to investigate a number of strange fires that break out in a Kent village around harvest time each year when the community is bustling with locals, Londoners, and Gypsies. Compton's company is interested in buying the local brickwork manufacturer, but he wants to make certain the purchase won't cause any ill effects to his company. Maisie soon senses that the villagers know more than they will say about the mysterious fires. They also won't talk about the Martin family killed in a zeppelin air raid during the Great War. Will Maisie discover the truth before revenge and guilt destroy the village? Winspear paints a historical cozy featuring intriguing characters and surprising twists. Maisie is absolutely compelling not only as an investigator but also as a psychologist while she probes the hearts and minds of those she meets. Highly recommended for all mystery and popular fiction collections.--Susan O. Moritz, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE Early September 1931 The old woman rested on the steps of her home, a caravan set apart from those of the rest of her family, her tribe. She pulled a clay pipe from her pocket, inspected the dregs of tobacco in the small barrel, shrugged, and struck a match against the rim of a water butt tied to the side of her traveling home. She lit the pipe with ease, clamping her ridged lips around the end of the long stem to draw vigor from the almost-spent contents. A lurcher lay at the foot of the steps, seeming at first to be asleep, though the old woman knew that one ear was cocked to the wind, one eye open and watching her every move. Aunt Beulah Webb--that was the name she was known by, for an older gypsy woman was always known as aunt to those younger--sucked on her pipe and squinted as she surveyed the nearby fields, then cast her eyes to the hop-gardens beyond. The hops would be hanging heavy on the bine by now, rows upon rows of dark-green, spice-aroma'd swags, waiting to be harvested, picked by the nimble hands of men, women and children alike, most of whom came from London for a working late-summer holiday. Others were gypsies like herself, and the rest were gorja from the surrounding villages. Gorja. More house dwellers, more who were not gypsies. Her people kept themselves to themselves, went about their business without inviting trouble. Aunt Beulah hoped the diddakoi families kept away from the farm this year. A Roma would trust anyone before a diddakoi--before the half-bred people who were born of gypsy and gorja. As far as she was concerned, they looked for trouble, expected it. They were forgetting the old ways, and there were those among them who left the dregs of their life behind them when they moved on, their caravans towed by boneshaker lorries, not horses. The woman looked across at the caravan of the one she herself simply called Webb. Her son. Of course, her son's baby daughter, Boosul, was a diddakoi, by rights, though with her shock of ebony hair and pebble-black eyes, she favored Roma through and through. About her business in the morning, Beulah brought four tin bowls from underneath the caravan--underneath the vardo in the gypsy tongue. One bowl was used to wash tools used in the business of eating, one for the laundering of clothes, one for water that touched her body, and another for the cleaning of her vardo. It was only when she had completed those tasks, fetching dead wood from the forest for the fire to heat the water, that she finally placed an enamel kettle among the glowing embers and waited for it to boil for tea. Uneasy unless working, Beulah bound bunches of Michaelmas daisies to sell door to door, then set them in a basket and climbed back into her vardo. She knew the village gorja, those out about their errands, would turn their backs when they saw her on the street, would glance away from her black eyes and dark skin now rippled with age. They would look aside so as not to stare at her gold hoop earrings, the scarf around her head, and the wide gathered skirt of threadbare deep-purple wool that marked her as a gypsy. Sometimes children would taunt. "Where are you going, pikey? Can't you hear, you old gyppo woman?' But she would only have to stare, perhaps point a charcoal blackened finger, and utter words in dialect that came from deep in the throat, a low grumble of language that could strike fear into the bravest bully--and they would be gone. Women were the first to turn away, though there were always a few--enough to make it worth her while--who would come to the door at her knock, press a penny into her outstretched hand, and take a bunch of the daisies with speed lest their fingers touch her skin. Beulah smiled. She would see them again soon enough. When dusk fell, a twig would snap underfoot as a visitor approached her vardo with care. The lurcher would look up, a bottomless growl rumbling in her gullet. Beulah would reach down and place her hand on the dog's head, whispering, " Shhhh, jook ." She would wait until the steps were closer, until she could hold the lurcher no longer, and then would call out, "Who's there?" And, after a second or two, a voice, perhaps timid, would reply, "I've come for my fortune." Beulah would smile as she uncovered the glass sphere she'd brought out and set on the table at eventide, waiting. Not that a ball made of a bit of glass had anything to do with it, yet that was what was expected. The gypsy might not have been an educated woman, but she knew what sold. She didn't need glass, or crystal, a bit of amethyst, a cup of still-wet tea leaves, or a rabbit's foot to see, either. No, those knickknacks were for the customers, for those who needed to witness her using something solid, because the thought of her seeing pictures of what was to come in thin air would be enough to send them running. And you never scared away money. Beulah heard a squeal from the tent that leaned against her son's vardo, little Boosul waking from sleep. Her people were stirring, coming out to light fires, to make ready for the day. True gypsies never slept in their spotless vardos, with shining brass and wafer-thin china hanging from the walls. Like Beulah, they lived in tents, hardy canvas tied across a frame of birch or ash. The vardos were kept for best. Beulah looked up to the rising sun, then again at the fields as the steamy mist of warming dew rose to greet the day. She didn't care for the people of this village, Heronsdene. She saw the dark shadow that enveloped each man and woman and trailed along, weighing them down as they went about their daily round. There were ghosts in this village--ghosts who would allow the neighbors no rest. As she reached down to pour scalding water into the teapot, the old woman's face concertina'd as a throbbing pain and bright light bore down upon her with no warning, a sensation with which she was well familiar. She dropped the kettle back into the embers and pressed her bony knuckles hard against her skull, squeezing her eyes shut against flames that licked up behind her closed eyelids. Fire . Again . She fought for breath, the heat rising up around her feet to her waist, making her old legs sweat, her hands clammy. And once more she came to Beulah, walking out from the very heart of the inferno, the younger woman she had not yet met but knew would soon come. It would not be long now; the time approached--of that she was sure. The woman was tall and well dressed, with black hair--not long hair, but not as short as she'd seen on some of the gorja womenfolk in recent years. Beulah leaned against the vardo, the lurcher coming to stand at her mistress's side as if to offer her lean body as buttress. This woman, who walked amid the flames of Beulah's imagination, had known sadness, had lived with death. And though she now stepped forward alone, the grief was lifting--Beulah could see it ascending like the morning cloud, rising up to leave her in peace. She was strong, this woman of her dreams, and . . . Beulah shook her head. The vision was fading; the woman had turned away from her, back into the flames, and was gone. The gypsy matriarch held one hand against her forehead, still leaning against her vardo. She opened her eyes with care and looked about her. Only seconds had passed, yet she had seen enough to know that a time of great trouble was almost upon her. She believed the woman--the woman for whom she waited--would be her ally, though she could not be sure. She was sure of three things, though--that the end of her days drew ever closer, that before she breathed her last, a woman she had never seen in her life would come to her, and that this woman, even though she might think of herself as ordinary, of little account in the wider world, still followed Death as he made his rounds. That was her calling, her work, what she was descended of gorja and gypsy to do. And Beulah Webb knew that here, in this place called Heronsdene, Death would walk among them soon enough, and there was nothing she could do to prevent such fate. She could only do her best to protect her people. The sun was higher in the sky now. The gypsy folk would bide their time for three more days, then move to a clearing at the edge of the farm, setting their vardos and pitching their tents away from Londoners, who came for the picking to live in whitewashed hopper huts and sing their bawdy songs around the fire at night. And though she would go about her business, Beulah would be waiting--waiting for the woman with her modern clothes and her tidy hair. Waiting for the woman whose sight, she knew, was as powerful as her own. Excerpted from An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
