Review by New York Times Review
Henning Mankell has spoken: Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander has solved his last case. Making this news more bitter, the alcoholic, diabetic, antisocial and perpetually dour Swedish detective is at his gloomy best in THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). After his colleagues on the Ystad police force gave him a 50th-birthday party, Wallander started keeping a record of all the people he knew of who were now dead, a morbid task that he abandoned after the 10th suicide. Five years later, he bought a house near the sea and acquired a dog, indicating some improvement in his mental health. But having reached the age of 60, Wallander has become lonely and despondent. "His life was now centered increasingly on recalling things from the past that he now realized he missed," Mankell observes, in the melancholy words of Laurie Thompson's translation. Wallander snaps out of his depression when his daughter, Linda, gives birth to his first grandchild, an event that leaves him "utterly defenseless" and (dare it be said?) happy. Which accounts for his concern when Linda's future father-in-law, a retired naval officer named Hakan von Enke, goes missing shortly after taking the detective into his confidence about an incident in 1982 involving Russian submarines infiltrating Swedish territorial waters. A month after von Enke disappears, his wife also drops out of sight, prompting Wallander to look more carefully at the conspiracy theories that had long obsessed her husband. As Wallander learns more about how Sweden maintained its neutrality in the swamp politics of the cold war, he realizes "how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in," and wonders if that "unwillingness to care about the real world" is typical of his generation. That's the kind of ideological question that matters to Wallander, who is forever flogging himself for the youthful indifference that left him ignorant of the ruthlessness of realpolitik and feeling helpless to do anything about it. "I sometimes manage to help people by making sure that criminals are removed from the streets," he acknowledges. "But aside from that?" Aside from that, he saves our sanity by taking the weight of the world off our minds and onto his own shoulders - an honorable legacy for someone who thought all his friends were dead. The poised, confident and extraordinarily efficient heroine of Jacqueline Winspear's new Maisie Dobbs novel, A LESSON IN SECRETS (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99), seems far removed from the young nurse whose World War I battlefield experiences left her determined to apply her training in the new science of psychology to the treatment of emotionally scarred soldiers and their families. Maisie is still helping people in 1932, but as a private investigator with a nice legacy to finance her comfortable life and her expanding London firm, she devotes more time to organizing her friends' lives and helping out the Special Branch. Maisie's current assignment finds her working undercover as a junior lecturer in philosophy at a Cambridge college founded on "the concept of peace" by a pacifist who is rudely dispatched by an assassin. British intelligence suspects that the school's predominantly foreign student body might be inculcating idealistic British youth with radical ideas imported from Russia. But Maisie, who is prescient in the way heroines tend to be in historical fiction, is more concerned about the impact of National Socialism in Germany. The story isn't half bad, but Maisie's sortie into group psychology can't touch the sensitive work she once did with shell-shocked soldiers. According to the terms of their lease, drolly recounted in Michael Robertson's first mystery, "The Baker Street Letters," Reggie and Nigel Heath were able to set up their modern-day law practice in the desirable 200 block of Baker Street by agreeing to answer all correspondence addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221B. Reggie, the less whimsical of the pair, has been neglecting that responsibility, so in THE BROTHERS OF BAKER STREET (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $24.99) that task falls to Nigel, freeing up Reggie to concentrate on defending a young cab driver accused of robbing and killing two American tourists. An anonymous letter to Holmes gives Reggie a valuable tip, but the communications from a certain Professor Moriarty add a more sinister twist to this breezy and entertaining legal mystery. There's one nice thing about literary puzzles - the clues don't normally involve bloody pentacles or symbolically displayed body parts. A few codes and cryptograms are all you need to get caught up in an enigmatic mystery like THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT (Holt, $25), Louis Bayard's fabricated account of a secret society of brilliant Elizabethan thinkers who challenge conventional 16th-century wisdom by exercising "the freedom to speak their minds." Henry Cavendish, the 21st-century scholar who narrates the story, tumbles to this academic crew when an unscrupulous collector (who would "lay down his life for a Shakespeare quarto") hires him to search the archives of a fellow bibliophile who committed suicide. Leaving Henry to puzzle out the clues in the library, Bayard shifts the story to Tudor England, where members of the eUte circle that meets at Sir Walter Ralegh's Dorset estate are immersed in their esoteric arts. From either perspective, the story is fascinating. And yes, there's a good reason that Shakespeare is not welcome in this company. The bitter, alcoholic, diabetic, antisocial, perpetually dour Kurt Wallander seems to be working his last case.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 27, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
The eighth Maisie Dobbs mystery begins as Maisie, a PI in London between the wars, takes on her first assignment for the British intelligence service. She will be working as a junior lecturer at a small college dedicated to peace and understanding among nations, but her real assignment is to look for dissidents and Communists. Soon after she arrives, the famous headmaster of the college is found dead in his office, and Maisie calls in Scotland Yard. With both the police and the intelligence service in town, Maisie is kept extremely busy but not so much that she fails to return to London most weekends to check on her assistant Billy, who has been trusted to work on solo investigations. The numerous activities Maisie manages to fit in and around her duties as a lecturer may push credulity for some readers, but Winspear somehow makes it work, pulling together a solid, three-stranded plot. Series fans will be pleased with both Maisie's latest investigations and the developments in her private life.--Moyer, Jessica Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Winspear's solid eighth Maisie Dobbs novel (after The Mapping of Love and Death), Maisie finds herself financially independent, thanks to a bequest from her late mentor, Dr. Maurice Blanche, and open to new challenges exactly at the moment the British Secret Service seeks to recruit her in 1932. Greville Liddicote, the author of a pacifist children's book that the government went to great pains to suppress during WWI, has founded a college in Cambridge devoted to maintaining peace in Europe. To keep tabs on Liddicote, Maisie infiltrates his school under the guise of a philosophy teacher. When a staff member is murdered, she reverts to her old profession and works to aid the police inquiry from the inside. Maisie's new affluence allows her to intervene benevolently in the lives of those she cares for and her romantic life intensifies, but these positive personal developments end up making her less interesting as a protagonist than formerly. 9-city author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Peace can be as deadly as war. Winspear's (The Mapping of Love and Death) eighth Maisie Dobbs mystery opens in 1932 with Maisie accepting an assignment from the British secret service to infiltrate the newly opened College of St. Francis by posing as a philosophy lecturer. That position will enable her to scrutinize the controversial founder, Greville Liddicote, as well as the school's activities and students. Greville's purpose in creating the school is to promote peaceful relations among cultures. The children's books that he wrote are rumored to have caused mutiny among the military during World War I. When Greville is murdered, Maisie becomes concerned, especially when she finds some faculty members are part of a pro-Hitler organization. What dark forces could have destroyed this man of peace? Maisie must sift through the past to find out. VERDICT Winspear strikes the right balance between cozy mystery setting and her intelligent, street-savvy PI. The story adroitly presents a post-World War I world while foreshadowing the next global conflict. Recommended for fans of historical mysteries like those by Charles Todd. [See Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]-Susan O. Moritz, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
War, peace and Maisie Dobbs' introduction to the German Nationalist Socialist Party.Maisie, whose accomplishments include wearing tidy linen jackets and hats with ribbons and spending the fortune a mentor left her in aid of chums in need of a boost, is asked to leave her private-enquiry agency and take on a task for the British Secret Service. Would she sign on as a teaching assistant in the philosophy department of Cambridge's College of St. Francis and ferret out goings-on not in the interests of the Crown? The college's founder, Greville Liddicote, has aroused attention because a children's book he authored fomented mutiny during the Great War and had to be suppressed. Liddicote, who founded his college on pacifist precepts, seems oddly opposed to a pro-or-con debate with Cambridge students on Hitler in Great Britain. But his reluctance becomes moot when someone breaks his neck. In between buying a house to resettle her assistant in; attempting to move her dad to more commodious digs; and pining for her lover James off in Canada, Maisie (The Mapping of Love and Death, 2010, etc.) decides to solve the Liddicote murder. She delves into the lives of lecturers and debaters, gets a copy of that banned children's book and warns the Secret Service of growing Nazism among the students. They ignore her concern, and the rest is history.A pivotal historical moment forced to take a back seat to the heroine's wardrobe and intuition.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
