"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 crumbles 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."
--Publisher’s Weekly

"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. 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."
--Kirkus Reviews

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