Review by New York Times Review
"YESTERDAY I TRIED to kill myself." That sour sneer of a voice belongs to Bernie Gunther, the Prussian homicide cop who survived World War II as the house detective at Berlin's fashionable Adlon Hotel. The war has been over for more than 10 years in Philip Kerr's new book, THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27). Bernie is currently a concierge at the Grand Hôtel du Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, just another "deracinated wanted man living quietly and under a false name," like so many other expat denizens of the French Riviera. He even has a wonderful cover story for anyone impolite enough to ask how he spent the war - as a captain in the army "Catering Corps," he swears. Bernie's skill as a bridge player is all that keeps him sane in these stultifying surroundings. It's a harmless pastime, he thinks, this hushed ceremony, "the perfect game for people who have something to hide." That tranquillity is compromised when Anne French, an English writer scheming to become W. Somerset Maugham's biographer, asks Bernie to teach her to play bridge so she can attend the cutthroat games that the aging author hosts at his fabulous Villa Mauresque. But it's Bernie's bridge game that wins over Maugham, who has played with great wits like Dorothy Parker and appreciates an intellectual sourpuss. "You're bitter. I like that," he observes of Bernie. "Bitter and maudlin. I like that, too." After declaring his visitor "an even bigger cynic than I am," he invites him to join his bridge group and, incidentally, to deal with his latest blackmailer. The closeted Maugham is accustomed to buying off indiscreet playmates. But this new threat focuses on pool parties at Villa Mauresque with those infamous Cambridge spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, whose recorded testimony could damage the author's career. The intricacies of the plot, partly based on Maugham's history as a British spy in charge of a team of secret agents, make this one of Kerr's best technical efforts. But it's the characterization of Maugham and the sound of his voice - "It's just too awful to be blackmailed by a chap who goes to the same shoemaker as oneself" - that makes this novel memorable. INSPECTOR AMAIA SALAZAR, the Spanish detective in Dolores Redondo's challenging procedural THE INVISIBLE GUARDIAN (Atria, $24.99), is stumped. Teenage girls from the town of Elizondo are being killed in "some kind of macabre purification rite" and their bodies provocatively posed by the river that carves its path through the town. Whenever she's baffled, the homicide detective tends to seek inspiration in church or from the tarot cards. This being Basque Country, where "what is now considered mythology was originally a religion," Amaia does both. Having grown up an unhappy child in Elizondo, Amaia is familiar with the pagan beliefs of the region. People are respectful of Mari, the nature goddess, "powerful, capricious and terrible," and grateful for the Basajaunak, hairy trolls that protect the enchanted woods. Redondo tells the ancient tales in a hypnotic voice, while overseeing Amaia's efforts to lead a scientific criminal investigation without being dragged back into the dark forest she thought she had escaped. AS A JOURNALIST, Gwen Florio filed stories from active war zones. As an author, she confers that experience on Lola Wicks, the protagonist of a gutsy series set mostly in Montana, where Lola relocated after being downsized from her newspaper job back East, DISGRACED (Midnight Ink, paper, $14.99) finds Lola in Casper, Wyo., picking up Palomino Jones, a soldier returning from Afghanistan. But no sooner does Pal's military transport land than one of the vets blows his brains out on the tarmac. That night, two other soldiers pick a fight in a bar and put a man in intensive care. And then Pal turns out to have a full-blown case of PTSD. "This would be the part where people questioned the wisdom of a faraway war that took their healthy children and returned them broken," Lola says. "But this was the rural West, with its staunch and unquestioning patriotism." In these parts, all the local boys who made it home are "heroes," and only a cynical reporter would question their sanitized war stories and wonder what really happened over there. MAISIE DOBBS HAS found herself another war - just what Jacqueline Winspear's detective needs to perk up after some horrid personal losses and professional setbacks. In JOURNEY TO MUNICH (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99), the year is 1938 and Maisie is back home in London after volunteering as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War. As a trained psychologist, she knows the deaths of her husband and their unborn child have left her emotionally vulnerable. But it takes a brusque request from the Secret Service to give her new purpose. Leon Donat, an elderly engineer of great importance to the war effort, is imprisoned in Dachau and only his daughter can claim him. But with the daughter in ill health, only a clever female operative could travel alone to Germany, impersonate the daughter and lead Donat to freedom. So far, soso. But by giving Maisie a secondary assignment to find a runaway socialite, Winspear throws in a sizzling subplot about well-born young women who are whooping it up in Germany. Kit Kat Klub, anyone?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Maisie Dobbs proves herself wily and fiercely determined again in this twelfth series entry, set in 1938, as she faces down another formidable enemy and some of her own personal demons. Happy with Maisie's previous successful mission (A Dangerous Place, 2015), British intelligence, again exercising its penchant for using civilian spies in the pre-WWII era, sends Maisie to retrieve Leon Donat, an elderly businessman accused of sedition, from Nazi clutches in Dachau. While Maisie's in Germany, an acquaintance hopes she will convince his daughter to leave her Nazi lover and return to England. In every way, things are a bit more complicated than anticipated, and our indomitable spy lands in a tight spot. A miasma of hatred, suspicion, and uncertainty pervades, and the inconsistencies in many characters' behavior highlight the fine moral line that, in wartime, is constantly shifting. A sense of melancholy and world-weariness makes this entry a little darker than others in the series. Readers who like this subtle mood shift may also enjoy Sarah R. Shaber's Louise Pearlie mysteries, and Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Voguel novels.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winspear's subpar 12th Maisie Dobbs novel (after 2015's A Dangerous Place) finds Maisie still struggling with a double tragedy. Her beloved husband, James, died during the test of an experimental fighter plane, and the shock of witnessing the accident caused Maisie to miscarry. Meanwhile, the British Secret Service taps her for a mission into Nazi Germany on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938. Engineer Leon Donat is being held in Dachau after being arrested for involvement in the production of an underground newspaper. The Germans agree to release Donat but only to a family member. Since his one surviving relative, his grown daughter, is seriously ill, Maisie is to impersonate her to gain Donat's freedom. As if that assignment isn't perilous enough, Maisie also agrees to look for a woman who has disappeared in Munich, the person who should have piloted the fighter instead of James. Maisie is unconvincing as an undercover operative, and the plot relies too heavily on contrivances. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
On an undercover mission for the British Secret Service in Nazi Germany, Maisie Dobbs must face not only the horrors of the Third Reich, but very real reminders of her own tragic past. It's 1938, and Maisie is finally back in England following a stint as a nurse in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (A Dangerous Place, 2015). Her homeland still holds the ghosts of her former life with her late husband, James, who died in a plane crash. Distraction comes in the form of a summons from the British government and her old friend Robert MacFarlane, for whom she's done clandestine work in the past. This time, Maisie is asked to travel to Munich as Edwina Donat, the daughter of Leon Donat, a wealthy British industrialist and publisher who's been wrongfully imprisoned in Dachau. Donat is of great value to the British government, and the secret service has secured his release but only if his daughterthe real one is too illis the one to fetch him. Maisie can more than handle herself, even against the Fhrer and his omnipresent SS men, and after MacFarlane gives her a quick lesson in firearms, she's off. Complicating things is Elaine Otterburn, the woman Maisie blames for James' death. Convinced by the influential Otterburns to persuade the hard-partying Elaine to return home from Munich, Maisie discovers that Elaine may be entangled in something more dangerous than just drinking with the Gestapo. Winspear elegantly balances Maisie's emotional turmoil and dogged patriotism with the growing tensions of a Europe on the brink of war. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
