Birds of a Feather

I am becoming a real fan of Winspear’s Maggie Dobbs series. I started with the most recent one set in Munich and liked it so much I decided to start with the first one and read them in order–one does not have to read them in order but there is an intriguing line tying them together. I have not read a lot of fiction about the twenty years between the great wars and Winspear is opening me to the reality of how losing two million young men affected British society at large.

In this volume, Maggie takes on a couple of issues which tangentially shed light on the medical, economic, social, and psychological ravaging of England’s society in and from WW I. The story is set about midpoint, around 1930, between the two wars, giving both a reflective and anticipatory tension to the central detective mystery.

The characters are interesting and well drawn though Maggie is pretty much the only fully developed one, and she remains troubled and confused throughout, to the point that I began to worry more for her than for her case!

As a man, I have been pleased to find that this attractive Maggie is interesting to me for what she is doing as a professional detective and how she is coping with a difficult back story and no particular future surety. It actually makes me a bit more sensitive, I think, toward the powerful changes in, for, and because of women in the 20th Century.

This mystery is about connections: of the past with the present, of a murder with a suicide, of children with parents. It is sometimes scary, sometimes peaceful, and often poignant. It all begins when Maisie notices a change in the behavior of her assistant, while simultaneously getting a request to meet with one of the most successful merchants in London. At their first meeting, she accepts his job–finding and returning his missing daughter. And she knows, of course, that she is not simply focused on the physical return of the daughter.
This is the second book in the series, and the second book that I’ve read. Both have been splendid, going far beyond the more traditional “find the villain” format of many mysteries. I strongly recommend this book–in which you may find out as much about yourself as about detective work.

I am a Masie Dobbs fan but this book is depressing. If I were recently widowed I would slit my wrists it is so dark. Thank goodness I was widowed 25 years ago. I realize Masie is dealing with her husband’s death, but this book is slow, depressing and boring. Several times I put it down and considered not finishing it but since it is part of a series, I thought it probably had information that carried on to the next. I would seriously recommend skipping this one. There is not much worth reading here unless you are depressed and want some company in your depression. Her deductive skills are minimal and she just seems to wander about until someone tells her something she needs to know. She never puts any clues together herself. If this were the first Masie Dobbs book I had read, I would have never picked up another.

Birds of a Feather, the second book in Jacqueline Winspears bestselling Maisie Dobbs series, is set at a time more than a decade after the conclusion of World War I but entirely under its shadow. As the Great Depression gathered steam, England and the nations of the Continent were just beginning to emerge from the terrible aftermath of the Great War, their countries littered with clinics and rehabilitation facilities where the front-line victims of the fighting lay, legless, armless, or otherwise badly damaged under the eyes of their devastated lovers or families. Maisies lover, Captain Simon Lynch, a physician, lies in a coma in one such place. Her faithful assistant, Billy Beale, is far more fortunate but deeply affected nonetheless by a leg wound and thirteen years of incomplete recovery.

The terrible cost of war

M. Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator, is thirty-three years of age as Birds of a Feather opens. The year is 1930. Maisie has opened her own practice, having emerged from the tutelage of her mentor, Maurice Blanche. She now lives on her own in a London apartment, while her aging father tends the horses at the country estate of Lord Julian Compton and his wife, Lady Rowan. It was there that Maisie was transformed from a poor girl of thirteen, entered into service at the estate, into a polished young woman with a Cambridge education.

Maisies practice is thriving. In the midst of other, minor cases, she is hired by one of the richest men in all of Europe to track down his missing daughter, a seemingly simple assignment. But complications arise soon as one of the daughters old friends is found murdered in her home. Detective Inspector Stratton of Scotland Yards Homicide Squad reluctantly finds that Maisie is conducting her own investigation of the murder, obviously a conflict in the making. Its clear that the two will collide as the plot unfolds and the investigation broadens. Throughout this suspenseful and intriguing novel, the terrible cost of World War I hangs over the action like a shroud.

About the author

Jacqueline Winspear was born and educated in England but now lives in Marin County, California. She has written a total of twelve Maisie Dobbs novels to date. As her website (linked above) explains, Jacquelines grandfather was severely wounded and shell-shocked at The Battle of the Somme in 1916, and it was as she understood the extent of his suffering that, even in childhood, Jacqueline became deeply interested in the war to end all wars and its aftereffects.

Birds of a Feather is the second volume in the Maisie Dobbs detective series. The author is English born Jacqueline Winspear. The book deals with the suicide and murder of women who have been friends for years but since the end of World War I have developed different lives. The Grim Reaper of World War I loss and death hovers over the slow paced novel. Maisie deals with a serious injury suffered by her father Fred, the drug use of her assistant Billy and and difficult murder cases to solves. The year is 1930 and the single woman Maisie is depressed over the vegetable her former lover Simon has become due to World War I injury. A depressing brew! Winspear loves to talk about female wardrobe choices and food. Light reading though it does give the reader an insight into the Great World and the guilt of those who survived the conflict.

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