"As with Winspear’s first novel, Maisie Dobbs, much of the pleasure of being with Maisie lies in the underlying class conflicts that permeate her world . . . [Birds of a Feather] ends on a satisfying (and teasing) note."
--David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
In times of war, it has always fallen to women to bind up the wounded and bury the dead. The Great War is over but the women’s work is never done in Jacqueline Winspear’s haunting novels, set in England before and after World War 1, which feature a former military nurse who goes into private practice as “M. Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator.” First met in 2003 in Maisie Dobbs, a startlingly original debut work that won a nomination for an Edgar Award for best novel from the Mystery Writers of America, this unorthodox sleuth returns in Birds of a Father (Soho, $25) to continue her healing mission on behalf of the survivors of a lost generation.
What makes Maisie such a remarkable operative is the holistic philosophy that informs her humane methods. Trained in Freudian psychology and conscious of the interaction of mind and body (she even follows the exercise regimen of Joseph Pilates), Maisie insists on tracing a crime to its psychic roots – and makes her clients sign an agreement to that effect. “The case notes would not be filed away,” we are told, “until those whose lives were touched by her investigation had reached a certain peace with her findings, with themselves and with one another.”
Joseph Waite, a self-made London entrepreneur who owns a chain of fancy-food emporiums, hires Maisie to find his runaway daughter without grasping how deeply the investigation will probe his own troubled past and without anticipating the old sorrows it will reawaken. So, although Maisie quickly discovers that Charlotte Waite fled the stifling comfort of her father’s home for the austere sanctuary of a Benedictine abbey in the Romney Marshes, Maisie will not hand Charlotte over to her domineering father until the detective is able to determine the cause of their ruptured bond –- and what it has to do with the violent deaths of three women who were good friends of Charlotte’s until their friendship ended abruptly after the war.
Maisie’s sensitive interviews with the families of the murdered women, as well as her efforts on behalf of her assistant, Billy Beale, a veteran whose leg was shattered, bear out Winspear’s poignant thesis that many war survivors cannot bear to be reminded of their own wounds. Some cringe in shame for what they did in the war and others suffer guilt just for being alive. Others, like the so-called spinsters who lost their sweethearts in battle and never loved again, simply hide, nursing a hurt without a name.
“That’s one more thing I detest about war. It’s not over when it ends,” snaps Lady Rowan Compton, the aristocratic suffragist who plucked Maisie out of domestic service and sponsored her education. “It still lives inside the living.”
With her own fiancé a mindless shell in a veterans’ hospital, Maisie makes it her business to help the speechless survivors of war -– the women who silently visit the graves, the fathers who cannot speak their sons’ names, even those broken souls who hope that murdering the living might bring back the dead. That sensibility makes her a heroine to cherish.
Not that Maisie is some glum, humorless missionary. Well, humorless, yes, but glum, not at all. Always open-minded, she bobs her hair, drives a red MG and by the end of this story has acquired two suitors. Let’s see if they can appreciate how special she is. Some definitions: a good second novel is one that, like Birds of a Feather, makes you want to read its predecessor.
--Marilyn Stasio,
New York Times Book Review
When I read a good mystery, I spend all day looking forward to bedtime, when I can crawl back into the seductive world of false leads and questionable alibis. Though mysteries have been my favorite pleasure reading since I discovered Agatha Christie as a teenager, I maintain that the best books of this genre are much more than mere entertainment. A great mystery doesn’t just ask “who done it?” but also “why,” and probes into the inner workings of the human psyche. It examines the ambiguities of guilt and innocence, and the nuances of temptation, truth, and trust. Best of all, it tells a great story.
In her first book, Maisie Dobbs, author Jacqueline Winspear introduced the spunky Britisher who serves as a battlefield nurse during World War I, and then returns home to set up shop as a “Psychologist and Investigator.” In her new book, Birds of a Feather (Soho Press), Winspear brings the blue-eyed Maisie Dobbs back for a case involving a missing debutante and three of her coterie that turn up dead. Dobbs is a likeable sleuth who rose from working class to college grad and whose charm and compassion help her to succeed in a society where single, professional women who drive their own motorcars are rare birds indeed.
But it is Dobbs’ investigative methods, which include intuition, meditation, and visualization, that really make her stand out. At crime scenes, she picks up psychic clues rather than fingerprints. To understand what a suspect is feeling, she observes how he stands and sits, then mimics his posture with her own body. Dobbs’ mentor refers to her work as “the forensic science of the whole person,” while another admirer calls it “the business of discovering why people do what they do.” When she takes on a case, she intends not just to find out “who done it,” but also to make sure “those whose lives were touched by her investigation had reached a certain peace with her findings, with themselves, and with one another.” And though they seem as if they emerged from a modern New Age retreat, the holistic approaches Dobbs employs have been around for a long time. The book’s references to Eastern meditation techniques, Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics, and Joseph Pilates’ work on core strength, for instance, are all historically accurate.
Birds of a Feather is a meticulously researched novel that will appeal to history buffs as well as fans of the polite, well-mannered, British style of mysteries. Though she wraps things up in a relatively happy ending, Winspear does not shy away from the moral complexities of guilt and innocence, nor from the post-war despair that hovered over Europe during that “lost generation” era.
--Frances Lefkowitz, Body & Soul magazine, October 2004
A sleuth finds her calling in wilds of World War I
A coming-of-age tale, wartime romance, and mystery, Jacqueline Winspear's debut novel, Maisie Dobbs, set in England before, during, and after World War I, portrayed the title character's unlikely journey from household servant to battlefield nurse to private investigator.
With the support of her aristocratic employer, the adolescent Maisie, hungry for knowledge, has the opportunity to study with Maurice Blanche, a doctor and detective with a philosophical turn of mind. Inspired by her teacher, Maisie pursues a career blending psychology and private investigation, viewing these occupations as a single whole, a means of healing and pursuing truth.
In that novel and now in its engrossing successor, Birds of a Feather, Maisie does what every detective does: She questions witnesses, tracks leads, gathers clues. Yet these works, best read together, are something more than conventional crime stories spiced with period detail.
Winspear's characters struggle with the unfinished business of the Great War, the lasting injuries to body, mind, and spirit. The cases become vehicles through which characters confront horrors and losses, with the idealistic Maisie aiming to help all parties attain a measure of wisdom and peace.
At least as intriguing as the mysteries themselves are Maisie's offbeat sleuthing methods. Recognizing the limits of dry facts, she uses meditation, mind-body exercises, and play-acting to get past people's facades, inhabit their worlds, mine their cares and vulnerabilities.
In Birds of a Feather, the imperious Joseph Waite, founder of a thriving chain of grocery stores, has hired Maisie to locate his daughter, Charlotte, a high-strung woman in her early 30s. Charlotte is apparently bent on escaping her father's domineering ways. Soon a series of bizarre deaths complicates the investigation: Several women, all friends of Charlotte during the war, are found in their homes poisoned; some were also stabbed with bayonets. The same clue turns up at each scene. What is the bond, Maisie wonders, among these women?
Is Charlotte's disappearance connected with the killings?
As with all good mysteries, Winspear's characters are no mere pawns serving up information and moving the plot along. The case illuminates their experiences and brings forth their emotional conflicts. Maisie begins her work slowly, spending time in the rooms of Charlotte and her circle, reading their physical surroundings, trying to glean their thoughts and feelings. Overcome in each instance by a sense of sadness and alienation, Maisie reveals much about her own melancholy.
Growing up in a time of war and dislocation, she has left behind home and family and has lost a fiance. As she digs deeper, Maisie learns how the war disrupted the lives of women like Charlotte and her friends, challenging them to find purpose and affiliation and leading them to make choices that would bring pain and regret.
Birds of a Feather succeeds both as a suspenseful mystery and as a picture of a time and place. The novel suggests not only the look of postwar London and the countryside but also the collective mood of the era, the "shared grief" lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life. As Lady Rowan, Maisie's benefactress, remarks, war is "not over when it ends, it still lives inside the living.'' Winspear's characters struggle with the tension between "remembrance and reminders'' -- on the one hand, the need to honor the past, and on the other, the misery induced by its tenacious presence in their lives. Some characters are trapped by these conflicts; others tentatively search for balance.
Despite its grim themes, Birds of a Feather is not a depressing book, thanks to its vivid characters and Maisie's basic optimism. With her high-minded goals, Maisie might have come across as self-righteous, priggish, or perhaps just too good to be true.
Yet she is none of these things. She never places herself above the people she tries to help and indeed contends with her own difficulties, including estrangement from her working-class father, grief and loneliness, the feelings of "not belonging'' that can come from moving among different social classes. Maisie's liveliness of mind, good sense, and kind nature make her a heroine a reader can enjoy spending time with, and make the next installment in the series something to anticipate with pleasure.
--Judith Mass, The Boston Globe,
July 2004
Maisie Dobbs is back. Jacqueline Winspear's engaging protagonist is still busy inventing herself in this second novel. In a class-conscious London, Maisie is both upstairs and downstairs, which makes her and her life complicated in interesting ways. It also gives her insight into the lives, fears and pleasures of a broader portion of English society than almost any other fictional mystery character now working.
Set in 1930, in that interesting hinge before England felt the full weight of economic collapse and when flappers and the license/freedoms of that time were on the wane, this series puts Maisie in a time when women had new powers, when the culture is a little more willing to accept a young detective/psychologist who hangs out her shingle with a cockney sidekick as help.
At the center of Ms. Winspear's two novels lies the effect of war on lives: The suffering and repercussions don't stop when the enemy is vanquished and the treaties signed. Families, friends and lovers of men and women killed or damaged live on with profound losses. Those who return physically whole from war often suffer in ways they are loath to reveal, their dreams and their psyches damaged by what they have seen and done. And then there are the young women. When a significant percentage of a nation's young men are lost in a war, even those women directly unaffected by war may find suitable mates in scarce supply.
Maisie, plucked from a downstairs future and educated by wise and wealthy patrons, has established herself nicely at her London office when she is abruptly summoned by a self-made grocery magnate. His only daughter, Charlotte, 32, has run away from home, and he wants her back in short order.
The father, while controlling and very used to having things precisely his way, proves startlingly generous with employees and their families hit by difficult circumstances or hard times. Still he evidences little patience or understanding for his vanished daughter. The household staff, loyal to their employer, seems less than sympathetic with the distant and difficult to please Charlotte.
Using careful observation and her sympathetic powers, Maisie inspects Charlotte's quarters and comes away with a sense of a young woman lonely and in despair. The latest finery she fancied has been replaced by simple and far more somber attire, and there is the sense that somehow the rooms have never been joyfully occupied.
A little sleuthing turns up the disturbing fact that three women from Charlotte's coterie of prewar friends have been murdered or apparently committed suicide in the previous weeks. Suddenly the case of the missing daughter turns into a search for a serial murderer with motives hard to fathom, and Charlotte's safety becomes a priority.
Ms. Winspear includes subplots that revolve around Billy, Maisie's acute but often annoying sidekick crippled by war wound; Maisie's aging but sweetly competent father whose work empathy with horses is sometimes stronger that his empathy with his daughter; and two very different and compelling suitors for the lonely protagonist.
Although the attentive reader may figure out the murderer's identity about halfway through this novel, the real question is what would drive such a person to commit this grim series of killings.
Finally, Maisie, who bills herself as detective/psychologist, can't be content to simply find all the pieces and connect the dots: She needs to help heal the principals. Ms. Winspear doesn't give us archvillains, but rather a cast of characters variously wounded or needy, and it's Maisie's job to help them begin to patch together their lives and relationships. Forgiveness and acceptance are the keys here, and Ms. Winspear manages to add dimension to her characters and their stories without smearing her tale with undue sentimentality.
Ms. Winspear's eye for fashion and historical detail add to the transport this novel accomplishes and provides a compelling picture of England between world wars. Maisie Dobbs triumphs by not hiding from her own considerable life traumas but by bringing her own compassion and hard-won wisdom to all she encounters.
--Lin Rolens, Santa Barbara News Press,
June 13, 2004
If you like classic mysteries told in the old style and were a fan of the 1970s BBC program "Upstairs, Downstairs," you'll love Winspear's Birds of a Feather. Since so much of the fun of Winspear's triumphant debut novel, Maisie Dobbs, came in watching our young heroine go from a servant girl in pre-World War I London to Cambridge and beyond, we had serious doubts for the success of a sequel.
Happily, those doubts have been laid to rest. There is no sophomore jinx here. If anything, Birds of a Feather is a better book, than the first, especially in the mystery plot, which is cleverly and fairly laid out. True, when Maisie, a professional private detective, finds the first ever-so-small clue, the reader is kept momentarily in the dark, perhaps because its true significance can't be known until the second -- and identical -- clue is discovered.
Those clues lead to the motive for the murder of three women and the attempt by a fourth to flee from her wealthy father's home. Although the book is set in the spring of 1930, the motive goes back to the Great War and is rooted in one of the more despicable actions undertaken by English feminists.
Winspear skillfully and gradually peels back the layers, eventually revealing the murderer who was there all the time. The fact that there are so few suspects only adds to the ingenuity of the puzzle.
--Tom and Enid Schantz, Denver Post, June 6th 2004
The eponymous heroine of Winspear's promising debut, Maisie Dobbs (2003), continues to beguile in this chilling, suspenseful sequel set in England a decade after the end of the Great War. Maisie, "Psychologist and Investigator," as the brass nameplate on her office door declares, gets hired by a wealthy industrialist to find his only daughter, Charlotte Waite, who has gone missing. With the help of her cockney assistant, Billy Beale, Maisie sets out to learn all she can of Charlotte's habits, character and friends. No sooner has Maisie discovered the identities of three of these friends than they start turning up dead -- poisoned, then bayoneted for good measure. At each crime scene is left a white feather. Increasingly preoccupied with these tragedies, Maisie almost loses sight of her original mission, until it becomes apparent that the murders and Charlotte's disappearance are related. As in her first novel, the author gives an intelligent and absorbing picture of the period, providing plentiful details for the history buff without detracting from the riveting mystery. Readers will be eager to see more of the spunky Maisie, with her unusual career as a one-time maid, nurse and university student.
--Publishers Weekly "Starred" Review,
May 3, 2004
Sinking into a novel this good is as satisfying as sinking into a good leather chair: we know we are in for the duration, and it feels right. Although alert readers will probably tease out the murderer about halfway through, the journey is worth it, for we are in the company of Maisie Dobbs, a P.I. who bears the scars of service as a nurse in the Great War.
When the owner of a chain of London food halls hires her to find his daughter, Maisie is intrigued as Charlotte Waite is in her thirties and has run away before. Then several women with ties to Charlotte are murdered -- morphine and a bayonet to the heart. Maisie teases this all out while practicing both the careful observance and interior meditation her mentor has taught her.
Maisie, who has gone from being in service to a graduate of Girton College at Cambridge, is as intelligent and engaging a sleuth as one might desire: the period touches, from clothing to manners, are not only elegantly presented but unostentatious.
--GraceAnne A. DeCandido, Booklist
Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear, published by Soho is out in hardback this month. This really is a terrific read, full of historical detail particularly about London and Kent and the surrounding countryside.
The author's first book Maisie Dobbs is currently out in paper by Penguin. I would suggest you read the first one, which defines the characters in this second book, even though it could well stand alone. Also, much of the action and plot in both books centers around the First World War and how families and their loved ones were affected by it.
After serving as a nurse in the Great War, Maisie as opened a small discreet investigation agency, and with the help of her assistant, Billy Beale,a disabled veteran, takes on a few interesting cases. In the current one, she has been called upon by a wealthy magnate to find his missing daughter who has suddenly left home without a word. As Maisie begins to investigate the disappearance, she also finds that three of the missing daughter's friends have come to a nasty end and begins to investigate any possible connection. With the help of her benefactor, Lady Rowan and her great friend and mentor Maurice Blanche, we are taken on a journey, rich in detail and dialogue, to the conclusion of the case and a painful reminder of the unforgettable horror of WW1. It is a wonderful story and I was engrossed to the very end.
--Patti Eby from Bookbag, The Union Jack Newspaper |
