A Dangerous Place

Her legal name is now Margaret, Lady Compton, but she still calls herself Maisie Dobbs. Having grown up in the London working-class neighborhood of Lambeth, Maisie is uncomfortable with the title. Widowed shortly after her marriage to the wealthy Lord James Compton, she has been abroad. She is fearful of returning to England, where unnerving memories await her.

It’s now April 1937, and Maisie has alighted in Gibraltar. It’s “a place seething with those dispossessed by war across the border.” The Spanish Civil War is raging.

For years before leaving England in 1933, Maisie had operated as a “psychologist and investigator.” When she stumbles across a dead body shortly after arriving in Gibraltar, she’s unable to resist investigating the death. The police insist the victim, a local photographer who was a Sephardic Jew, had been murdered by a vagrant. Maisie is convinced otherwise. Her conviction, and her compulsion to act, lead her into a tangled mystery involving arms smugglers aiding the Republican forces in Spain’s civil war. The investigation takes her onto the front lines in Madrid, where the loyalist Republicans are valiantly resisting Francisco Franco’s Fascist legions. As the action unfolds, the German and Italian destruction of Guernica takes place.

I’ve read and enjoyed the ten previous novels in Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. I found A Dangerous Place less enjoyable because I had difficulty understanding Maisie’s thinking and the motivation of several other characters in the story. Why did she insist on investigating that murder? Why is the British secret service following her so closely? (Her father-in-law’s interest is unconvincing.) Who was the mysterious blond man who appeared in one of the photographer’s photos? Winspear’s answers to these questions weren’t satisfying.

A Dangerous Place: This Maisie Dobbs novel finds Maisie a young widow. Her husband James Compton was killed when the plane he piloted crashed. The shock of losing him caused her to also lose her unborn child. Maisies parents, her friend Pricilla and the Comptons want her to come back to England, but Maisie goes to India instead, and then sails for England, but first she stops in Gibraltar.
The Spanish civil war rages, and Gibraltar is a very dangerous place to be. Maisie finds herself trailed by Scotland Yard, the local police and by a strange local carpenter whose motives are unclear. She stumbles over the battered body of a photographer, and Maisie, being the professional detective that she is, decides to solve his murder.
This is far from the best Maisie Dobbs mystery. The solution is twisted and satisfying, and the political commentary is as useful and as true today as much as it was back in the days when Hitler rose to power and socialists fought Fascists in Spain, but as Maisie wanders the maze of war and political intrigue, the reader sometimes gets lost.
Descriptions of the dead, the maimed and the real cost of war will haunt the reader
The essence of this wonderful character, Maisie Dobbs is lost is lost in this novel. her fans expect her to be a detective, not a nurse.
The next book in the series, where Maisie goes to Munich, looks more interesting. But remember that Maisie the spy and Maisie the nurse are much different from Maisie the detective. Perhaps the author, as she takes the character through interesting historical times, is losing the original intent which was to write detective stories featuring an investigator psychologist.

I am incredibly disappointed with this book. I may not read anymore of these Maisie Dobbs books although I have others in the series that come after this one. I actually started getting tired of her in the one just before this.

The main character, Maisie, started out in the series as an incredibly caring, sensitive human being. By this book, she has become a selfish, self-righteous twit who needs to be smacked back into reality. I refused to read the last several pages of the letters written to her family and friends explaining why it is more important for her to ignore their feelings and fears, and her father’s aging, so she can one more time put herself in danger because it makes her feel ALIVE. What utter, arrogant balderdash.

I was so excited when I found these books, thanks to a line in Hilary Clinton’s latest book, that I was ready to rhapsodize about them to my friends. I will NOT be recommending them to anyone anymore.

I had some difficulty with this latest installment in the Maisie Hobbs series, which I have enjoyed reading over the previous 10 volumes. the main issue is that the author has apparently decided to take another direction with the main character and, in order to accomplish this, has written out the supporting characters and story lines that occupied the previous novels. One of the pleasures of the series was the regular cast, including friends and relatives. the only character from the previous novels that shows up in person here is a fairly minor one, the Scots chief inspector Robbie, but he doesn’t do very much in this plot line. I don’t object to taking Maisie into a new focus on international intrigue so much as I object to losing the emotional depth of the previous world the author created. I think it odd that the sudden demise of her long-term love interest, and her eventual return to England following the episode in Spain, is basically handled in summary form, literally in a couple of paragraphs or so, rather than exploring the actual experiences through dialogue and action. I admit that I never liked the way the author delayed the “consummation” of Maisie’s relationship, and didn’t think it was realistic, but I was more disturbed that she then killed off the husband and child plot in the prologue to the next novel, and sent Maisie into a barely explicable sojourn in the Spanish civil war. Really? I hope she can provide this main character with more substance in the next go-round.

Due to some of the negative reviews, I was slow to purchase this one, although I’m a big fan of the Maisie Dobbs series. However, having read it and enjoyed it, here are some thoughts. Is Maisie depressing and whiny, as one review has stated? No, I didn’t get that sense at all. Is the story strong? Yes and no. I didn’t find the central mystery as compelling as others and the resolution to the murder brought no great surprises. I will say also that I found it difficult to connect with Maisie for the first half of the book. Without the normal cast of characters around her, I felt that I didn’t quite recognise her for some time. However, I felt by the time I got to the half way mark that I was on solid ground, felt connected to Maisie again and enjoyed the direction of the story. Not a classic, but I think it’s a key link to the stories that follow and the next chapters of Maisie’s life. In short, I got there in the end and I’m pleased I went on the journey.

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