A Dangerous Place: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Love the maisie Dobbs series. Each one better than the last. Sad the series ended.

It is 1937 and Europe is on the inexorable path that will lead to World War II. Maisie Dobbs is in Gibraltar, the strategic position of which makes it invaluable as a listening post for many countries. Spies seem to be lurking around every corner and some of them are inordinately interested in what Maisie is doing. And what is Maisie doing? Well, she is trying to come to terms with a recent double tragedy in her life. She had married her lover, James Compton, and moved with him to Canada where he was employed testing aircraft that would play an integral part in any war to come. It was a happy time for her. She was eight months pregnant with their first child. Then catastrophe struck. The plane that James was testing went down in a fiery crash and James was killed. This all happened as Maisie watched. She started running toward the crash site, tripped and fell. Her child was delivered early and was dead. On one momentous day, she lost the two loves of her life. After she was sufficiently recovered physically, she sailed for England by way of India. She spent some quiet and peaceful time in India and then continued on, but when she got to Gibraltar, she found herself not ready to face her friends' and family's sympathy and the familiar surroundings that she had shared with James, so she disembarked and decided to spend some time there and wait for a later ship to take her home. Placing Maisie in Gibraltar gives Jacqueline Winspear an opportunity to explore some of the events leading up to the world war, as well as some of the tangled relationships between various countries and political groups. Nearby, the civil war in Spain is raging and both the communists and the fascists are present and attempting to further their cause in Gibraltar. A Dangerous Place indeed. Maisie soon becomes embroiled in the efforts of a group of people supporting the Republican cause in Spain. She does this by stumbling over a dead body on a dark path near her hotel one night. Having found the body, she feels a responsibility to find out what happened to the man and how he came to be struck down. This leads her down some dangerous paths as she gets to know his family and associates and tries to learn what he was doing that might have led someone to want him dead. I felt that Winspear did a very good job of describing the setting and developing a real feel for what must have been the fraught atmosphere of those times. Moreover, since Maisie is adrift without her usual cast of secondary characters, the author introduced several strong and sympathetic new characters. Many of these characters have secrets and are not what they first appear to be. They add complexity and a new element of suspense to the story. This was quite different from the usual Maisie Dobbs tale that we've come to know. But, again, Winspear does a good job of weaving Maisie's backstory into the plot, so she is able to recount her rags-to-riches narrative, her tragic experience as a nurse in World War I, and her time as an independent businesswoman in London and make it all come together in a coherent account. Even if one had not read the earlier books in this series, this book could easily be read as a standalone. So, where is Maisie to go from here? She and the series are at a crossroads it seems, even as the world itself reaches a crossroads. Will she follow the world into war once again? Will she become a spy? Winspear has given us quite a lot to think about here and it will be interesting to see where she takes her character next.

Maisie is still in mourning but healing. After a time in India and now returning to England, she realizes she is not ready to go home. A stop in Gibraltar uncovers the beginnings of another time of war. Agents and factions from many countries are converging there as they watch and manipulate the civil war in Spain. Power, money and a ruthless disregard of innocent lives brings unlikely people together. An intriguing read.

The letters at the beginning and end of the book are packed with information while leaving the reader to supply imagination and pathos.

Maisie Dobbs has finally left England. In fact (as we are told in a whirlwind synopsis at the beginning of this book), she has left England, gone to India, come back to England, gone to Canada, gone to Boston, gone to India again, and now has left her ship at Gibraltar on her way back to England again. That's a lot of action to summarize in a few pages, but the rest of the book is so glacially slow that I suppose it makes up for the initial rush. The pace doesn't pick up until nearly the end of the book. (At least, to give Winspear credit, it doesn't end with a damsel-in-distress crisis!) A long-time reader of this series, I have always enjoyed some of the Maisie Dobbs book more than others, but this one is a chore to get through, even worse than the one where Maisie goes undercover as a college lecturer. Both of these books are about political intrigue rather than "conventional" murders. and Winspear doesn't seem to have the skill to make spying interesting. Instead, she presents pages and pages of historical background, delivered in conversations. In between cups of coffee (and pastries and bowls of soup), Maisie walks around Gibraltar day after day, musing on her past and bothering the locals in pursuit of information about a murder she stumbled upon. For any reader who has not been following the ups and downs of this series, the actual story content of "A Dangerous Place" would be thin indeed. There is so little action in this book! The reader does not even see Maisie stumbling upon the corpse. That's already in the past (along with a whole book's worth of developments and trauma in Maisie's life) when the action starts. It makes me wonder: did Winspear write another book and decide not to publish it between the previous story and this one? But then, over-reliance on flashback and reminiscence has been the weak point of the entire Maisie Dobbs series. Winspear seems fixated on Maisie's clothing. It is very simple clothing, suitable for travel. Why should we care which blouse and skirt and sandals she is wearing on a particular day? I thought it might figure into the plot, but -- this is not much of a spoiler -- it doesn't. Would the author lavish such attention on the choice of shirt and socks of a male detective? I doubt it. Winspear does paint a vivid picture of Gibraltar in 1937 and of the Spanish Civil War. The most compelling part of the story involves a side-trip Maisie makes into the war zone around Madrid. The murder mystery that forms Maisie's excuse for busy-bodying in Gibraltar is poorly resolved, however, as it turns out to be a sidebar to the bigger story of war and espionage. The author says in her note that she was fascinated with the history of the British settlement at Gibraltar. Maybe she should have written a stand-alone novel about that rather than trying to shoe-horn the Rock into the Maisie Dobbs series.

Quel dommage que Jacqueline Winspear ait achevé ce cycle de romans dont l’héroïne est si attachante et si humaine. Si vous ne connaissez pas, lisez vite ces intrigues policières assez subtiles, pas trop violentes, addictives.

I won't give any spoilers but the story was too dramatic at the beginning and I thought the detective plot was very weak, so much conjecture, too much cloak and dagger. And no clear conclusion to it. Changed too much from the earlier books, and I should have seen that coming after reading book 9. It's just not an entertaining detective mistery series anymore. And honestly, I got tired of how Masie keeps veneering Dr Maurice Blanche like some cult leader.

I have read most of the Maisie Dobbs books and liked them very much. This one was good on atmosphere and characterization, as usual. However, I found the plot just plain unbelievable in many places. Here's the unknown Maisie, who walks into Gibralter, nobody knows her, she just settles in, stumbles over a body and begins to investigate a murder and the locals open up to her. Why should they? She knows nothing about the victim, she just pokes her nose in. Then she decides to go to Spain, which is in the middle of a messy civil war for very nebulous reasons, and finds someone to take her. It all tries one's credulity, frankly, and I expected more of the author. I think this happens when authors stray out of the places they really know and start writing about places they don't really know, but have merely seen and experienced on holiday. I hope the author sticks to what she knows from now on.

Good reading

I was given a set of Maisie Dobbs books and this one was missing, but it was necessary to read this as so much happened in this one. These books are a nice easy read, very gentle as they are set in the 30's and 40's so that makes sense. some of the events are a bit coincidental and not really believable but I have enjoyed reading them all.