Books in January
Happy New Year! Lots of reading to do!
Maisie Dobbs is asked to travel to France, to confirm the death in WWI of an aviator whose dying mother believed that he had lived and whose father promised one last search on her deathbed. At the same time, Maisie’s good friend Priscilla asks her to try to uncover the truth of the death of her beloved older brother, also during the war. And if that was not enough, there’s a young girl charged with murdering a man in London who cannot remember what she might have done….This third book in the Maisie Dobbs series takes us back once again to France in the Great War, but this time Maisie’s connection to the past is far more personal, and visceral. She needs to reconcile with the past before she can move on into her future, and the journey is far from easy. I’m really enjoying discovering these novels, which carry much more psychological depth than the typical historical mystery series, and I’m looking forward to reading much more to come; recommended.
Maisie Dobbs is intrigued when a young woman who went to the same school as herself asks her to look into the death of her twin brother; the young man, an artist, was preparing a space for a huge exhibition of his work when he fell from scaffolding to his death, apparently accidentally. The wealthy family are all artists of one sort or another, except for the oldest daughter who is a war widow and the only practical member of the household, and the various relationships between these family members is of great interest to Maisie, as are the relationships between the artist and his friends. In the meantime, she needs also to contend with a troublesome personal matter, and she is worried about her assistant Billy’s family too…. This is the fourth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series, and is I think the saddest of the books so far, at least in terms of Maisie’s personal life. Once again the mystery turns on events in the Great War, but this time Maisie is more strongly buttressed in terms of the emotions the events stir in her, having grown through her own breakdown a few months previously. I continue to enjoy learning about the world in 1930s England, including the rise of fascism in that country (a speech given by Oswald Mosley in this book bears very close - and chilling - resemblance to speeches by an American political leader in very recent years) and the plight of the lower classes in the grip of the Depression; recommended.
Professor Kate Fansler spends her days teaching English literature to graduate students and researching 19th Century authors, but that does not mean she isn’t sociable and au courant with contemporary life. When one of her students asks her for a referral to a psychoanalyst, she sends the young woman to her friend and ex-lover Emmanuel Bauer, but when seven weeks later the woman is found dead on Dr. Bauer’s therapy couch, Kate knows she must investigate, for the police are surely ready to assume that the most obvious suspect is the killer…. The Kate Fansler books were written between the 1960s and early 2000s, by an author who herself was a university professor and feminist scholar (real name Carolyn Heilbrun), but I had never come across them until a friend recently recommended this series to me. I liked the intellectual content of this book, the first in the series, in that the author assumes a certain level of education in her readers, but at the same time this is by no means a dry academic tome, instead it sparkles with wit and humour. I don’t know if the secondary characters here (Dr. Bauer and his wife, and Reed Amhearst, Assistant District Attorney) will be present in future books, but I hope so as I like them all and they work well together in the sleuthing business; recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is asked by James Compton, son of her patron and an old friend, to look into matters at Heronsdene in Kent. His company wants to buy property from the local landowner, Alfred Sandermere, but he is troubled by tales of petty crime and odd small fires that seem to plague the village. As it happens, Maisie’s assistant Billy Beale and his family are about to go to the area to join in the seasonal hop-picking, along with many East End London families and an annual pilgrimage of Roma; the villagers dislike both groups of strangers, but concede that their labour is needed for the month or so during which the harvest must be completed. While Billy picks up information from his co-workers and others, Maisie endeavors to learn what is behind the village’s general reticence, and before too long she finds herself once more immersed in the fall-out of wartime events…. This is the fifth Maisie Dobbs story, and in it we learn a bit more about her ancestry in addition to receiving an education in post-World War I attitudes in England toward so-called gypsies, both from city folk and the country villagers who reluctantly interact with them. As well, some part of Maisie’s own personal history reaches a resolution, which is satisfying even if feeling a bit of an after-thought. I continue to enjoy this series, with its exploration of various facets of English life between the wars, and am looking forward to reading more; recommended!
“The Time Traveler’s Almanac” is a very ambitious anthology, encompassing the best short stories and novellas published in English throughout, well, modern times, in this case ranging from the 19th Century (H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”) to the early 21st Century, at least until the publication of this volume in 2013. The extremely long book is broken into various categories: “Experiments” (for example, the above-mentioned Wells), “Reactionaries and Revolutionaries” (Connie Willis’s “Firewatch”), “Mazes and Traps” (Gene Wolfe, “The Lost Pilgrim”) and “Communiques” (Isaac Asimov’s “What If,” Charles Stross’s “Palimpsest”). In addition, each section begins with a non-fiction introduction by authors such as Rian Johnson, Charles Yu, Stan Love, Genevieve Valentine and Jason Heller, and the editors provide brief biographies of each author at the beginning of each story. To be honest, I cannot pick one or several favourites in this volume because I bought it in about 2015 and have been reading it - very slowly - ever since, only finishing in January 2022; there’s no way I can remember all the contents over that stretch of time! But I can say that if time travel stories appeal to you but you’re not sure where to start, this is an excellent volume with which to begin; and if you enjoy time travel stories in general, you’ll certainly find material that is new to you here. And in either case, there’s a whole lot to love; highly recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is seconded to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, in a bid to locate and stop a madman who appears prepared to unleash chemical warfare in London. Maisie’s name was mentioned in letters the madman sent to various officials, but she has no idea who he might be; in the letters, the man complains that the wounded and shell-shocked survivors of the Great War have been abandoned, and he demands that this be rectified, a sentiment with which Maisie agrees. As the end of 1931 approaches, she and others at Scotland Yard and Military Intelligence must race against time to uncover the few clues before it’s too late. And if that is not enough, Maisie’s best friend Priscilla is suffering a crisis of her own that demands Maisie’s attention…. I have long believed that there is a qualitative difference between PTSD as the result of a single event and PTSD due to protracted, continuous or repeated traumas to the psyche, and this novel certainly brings those differences to the fore. The sixth of the Maisie Dobbs novels, this might be the darkest yet, centering as it does on the biggest horror of WWI, that of chemical warfare. At the same time, though, I have a feeling that one relationship new to this novel will continue far into Maisie’s life, on both a professional and personal basis; I’ll have to keep reading the series to find out if I’m right! As usual, recommended.
A police officer is found comatose in her home, and then dies in hospital; the autopsy reveals that she was a victim of FGM, a horrendous practice in the culture of her birth country. Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Lynley and his team, including Detective Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, investigate the death, soon determined to have been murder, and their search takes them into the murky world of the treatment of women in some of London’s racialized communities…. There’s much to be said for Ms. George having the courage to write about such a relentlessly difficult subject as female genital mutilation and to portray a Nigerian community as if from the inside out, but I had some problems with the book: first, at just shy of 700 pages, it’s massive; I think some of the numerous subplots could have been condensed or dispensed with altogether. Second, I’m getting so sick of Tommy and his increasingly ridiculous love life - he’s been a mess since Helen’s death (9 books ago) and as a plot point, it’s gotten really old by now. Third, Barbara and Winston seem to be almost caricatures at this point, she with the constant bad diet and blundering behaviours, he with the dropped “t’s” with every other word or so. Also, Deborah St. James is crucial to this outing, but her husband Simon is barely mentioned. However, all of these quibbles relate to the fact that this series has been going on for a very long time, since the 1990s in fact, and by this entry, the 21st, I know these characters all too well. Which is to say, I still buy these books the instant they come out, in hardcover, which tells readers of this review that I’m committed to this series. If you’ve been reading the series, you’ll want this one; I can’t quite imagine someone getting to know these characters for the first time through this book, though, as it’s quite an ordeal in both length and subject material.
When the body of an American cartographer is unearthed by a farmer in France, the man’s parents ask Maisie Dobbs to go through the papers accompanying the body and, if possible, find the young lady with whom their son had apparently been in love almost 20 years before. Maisie’s search uncovers far more than she expected, and the information she develops places both the man’s parents and Maisie herself in mortal danger…. This is the seventh Maisie Dobbs story, and one of the most poignant: aside from the mystery itself, Maisie finds both love and death in her personal life, and some huge changes in her circumstances. I have been enjoying these books, particularly with respect to how each character feels like a fully developed person complete with all the complex emotions each human being harbours; in that regard, this one may be my favourite so far. Recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is asked by Brian Huntley of the Secret Service to work undercover as a philosophy teacher at St. Francis College in Cambridge, in order to determine if there are seeds of political or social revolution being planted in the young. However, when the founder of the college, a pacifist whose dream was to build a peaceful world by bringing the young of all nations together to study, is murdered, Maisie’s job grows to encompass aid to Scotland Yard in addition to her clandestine assignment. While she is excited to be in a new role, she is disturbed at what she uncovers, and she knows that she may not be able to extricate herself from the underbelly of state secret forces once she’s drawn in…. In this, the eighth book in the series, Maisie is coping not only with a change in her professional status but also with her new wealth, her growing relationship with James, the son of her benefactress, and the possibility that her father may himself be courting, too; quite a plateful for our Maisie! I found this novel to be less disturbing than the previous two, although the intermittent mentions of the rising politician in Germany in 1932 is, of course, most worrisome - not least because of the reactions of some English people from various classes. It’s a good reminder that historical events do not rise in a vacuum but rather occur in a specific context, which is very well delineated here; recommended.
When a man from Maisie’s childhood is killed in an industrial accident, his friends band together to ask Maisie to look into the death; the man had been considered “simple,” but was dearly loved by many in the neighbourhood and known for his gentle touch with horses. Before too long, Maisie finds herself embroiled not only in old neighbourhood feuds, but in modern politics and the increasing worries about what might come from Germany’s new chancellor, not to mention her relationship with James Compton and where it may be heading…. I enjoyed the depictions of working-class and working poor neighbourhoods in this novel, the ninth in the Maisie Dobbs series, and I especially liked the way the world of work, which had heretofore relied upon horses for labour and transportation, is slowly being transformed by the increasing use of automobiles (and the attendant environmental changes that causes). I was less enamoured of the political aspects of the story, primarily because I am quite averse to stories involving the Second World War; even though this story takes place in 1933, long before that conflict, the seeds were being sewn during this period and so those politics were inescapable if this novel was to be true to its time period. That aside, it’s another good entry in this series; recommended.
I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Valentine and Roderick DeVere are in the top echelon of New York City society - well, Roderick is anyway, as his ancestors had been there since before the settlement was called New Amsterdam; Val is from the West, where her father amassed a fortune from silver mining and whose money has rescued the DeVere’s from financial embarrassment. One of the perks of their position is their proximity to the new Central Park, an expansive area ostensibly open to all but in reality primarily the purview of the rich. When several young women are found in the Park strangled to death, and a variety of bombings and incidents of arson also plague the area, Val decides to come to the aid of Detective Finlay, a morose police officer whose job is in jeopardy if he cannot solve the crimes. But without more information, Val risks becoming a crime victim herself…. This is the first novel in a projected series by Cecelia Tichi, and it is clear that she knows her place and period; she has written about the Gilded Age (and about cocktails, which feature throughout this novel) in her role as an academic. I very much enjoyed Val’s feistiness, which is inextricable from her Western roots, and Roddy’s swings between fond husband and upright member of Society are very amusing, although I don’t know enough about the period to know if Val could really have had the degree of freedom that she does in this book. Nevertheless, I look forward to reading more of this couple and their adventures - not to mention those of their dog Velvet! Recommended.
And we end January wishing all a Happy Imbolc!
Maisie Dobbs is asked to travel to France, to confirm the death in WWI of an aviator whose dying mother believed that he had lived and whose father promised one last search on her deathbed. At the same time, Maisie’s good friend Priscilla asks her to try to uncover the truth of the death of her beloved older brother, also during the war. And if that was not enough, there’s a young girl charged with murdering a man in London who cannot remember what she might have done….This third book in the Maisie Dobbs series takes us back once again to France in the Great War, but this time Maisie’s connection to the past is far more personal, and visceral. She needs to reconcile with the past before she can move on into her future, and the journey is far from easy. I’m really enjoying discovering these novels, which carry much more psychological depth than the typical historical mystery series, and I’m looking forward to reading much more to come; recommended.
Maisie Dobbs is intrigued when a young woman who went to the same school as herself asks her to look into the death of her twin brother; the young man, an artist, was preparing a space for a huge exhibition of his work when he fell from scaffolding to his death, apparently accidentally. The wealthy family are all artists of one sort or another, except for the oldest daughter who is a war widow and the only practical member of the household, and the various relationships between these family members is of great interest to Maisie, as are the relationships between the artist and his friends. In the meantime, she needs also to contend with a troublesome personal matter, and she is worried about her assistant Billy’s family too…. This is the fourth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series, and is I think the saddest of the books so far, at least in terms of Maisie’s personal life. Once again the mystery turns on events in the Great War, but this time Maisie is more strongly buttressed in terms of the emotions the events stir in her, having grown through her own breakdown a few months previously. I continue to enjoy learning about the world in 1930s England, including the rise of fascism in that country (a speech given by Oswald Mosley in this book bears very close - and chilling - resemblance to speeches by an American political leader in very recent years) and the plight of the lower classes in the grip of the Depression; recommended.
Professor Kate Fansler spends her days teaching English literature to graduate students and researching 19th Century authors, but that does not mean she isn’t sociable and au courant with contemporary life. When one of her students asks her for a referral to a psychoanalyst, she sends the young woman to her friend and ex-lover Emmanuel Bauer, but when seven weeks later the woman is found dead on Dr. Bauer’s therapy couch, Kate knows she must investigate, for the police are surely ready to assume that the most obvious suspect is the killer…. The Kate Fansler books were written between the 1960s and early 2000s, by an author who herself was a university professor and feminist scholar (real name Carolyn Heilbrun), but I had never come across them until a friend recently recommended this series to me. I liked the intellectual content of this book, the first in the series, in that the author assumes a certain level of education in her readers, but at the same time this is by no means a dry academic tome, instead it sparkles with wit and humour. I don’t know if the secondary characters here (Dr. Bauer and his wife, and Reed Amhearst, Assistant District Attorney) will be present in future books, but I hope so as I like them all and they work well together in the sleuthing business; recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is asked by James Compton, son of her patron and an old friend, to look into matters at Heronsdene in Kent. His company wants to buy property from the local landowner, Alfred Sandermere, but he is troubled by tales of petty crime and odd small fires that seem to plague the village. As it happens, Maisie’s assistant Billy Beale and his family are about to go to the area to join in the seasonal hop-picking, along with many East End London families and an annual pilgrimage of Roma; the villagers dislike both groups of strangers, but concede that their labour is needed for the month or so during which the harvest must be completed. While Billy picks up information from his co-workers and others, Maisie endeavors to learn what is behind the village’s general reticence, and before too long she finds herself once more immersed in the fall-out of wartime events…. This is the fifth Maisie Dobbs story, and in it we learn a bit more about her ancestry in addition to receiving an education in post-World War I attitudes in England toward so-called gypsies, both from city folk and the country villagers who reluctantly interact with them. As well, some part of Maisie’s own personal history reaches a resolution, which is satisfying even if feeling a bit of an after-thought. I continue to enjoy this series, with its exploration of various facets of English life between the wars, and am looking forward to reading more; recommended!
“The Time Traveler’s Almanac” is a very ambitious anthology, encompassing the best short stories and novellas published in English throughout, well, modern times, in this case ranging from the 19th Century (H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”) to the early 21st Century, at least until the publication of this volume in 2013. The extremely long book is broken into various categories: “Experiments” (for example, the above-mentioned Wells), “Reactionaries and Revolutionaries” (Connie Willis’s “Firewatch”), “Mazes and Traps” (Gene Wolfe, “The Lost Pilgrim”) and “Communiques” (Isaac Asimov’s “What If,” Charles Stross’s “Palimpsest”). In addition, each section begins with a non-fiction introduction by authors such as Rian Johnson, Charles Yu, Stan Love, Genevieve Valentine and Jason Heller, and the editors provide brief biographies of each author at the beginning of each story. To be honest, I cannot pick one or several favourites in this volume because I bought it in about 2015 and have been reading it - very slowly - ever since, only finishing in January 2022; there’s no way I can remember all the contents over that stretch of time! But I can say that if time travel stories appeal to you but you’re not sure where to start, this is an excellent volume with which to begin; and if you enjoy time travel stories in general, you’ll certainly find material that is new to you here. And in either case, there’s a whole lot to love; highly recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is seconded to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, in a bid to locate and stop a madman who appears prepared to unleash chemical warfare in London. Maisie’s name was mentioned in letters the madman sent to various officials, but she has no idea who he might be; in the letters, the man complains that the wounded and shell-shocked survivors of the Great War have been abandoned, and he demands that this be rectified, a sentiment with which Maisie agrees. As the end of 1931 approaches, she and others at Scotland Yard and Military Intelligence must race against time to uncover the few clues before it’s too late. And if that is not enough, Maisie’s best friend Priscilla is suffering a crisis of her own that demands Maisie’s attention…. I have long believed that there is a qualitative difference between PTSD as the result of a single event and PTSD due to protracted, continuous or repeated traumas to the psyche, and this novel certainly brings those differences to the fore. The sixth of the Maisie Dobbs novels, this might be the darkest yet, centering as it does on the biggest horror of WWI, that of chemical warfare. At the same time, though, I have a feeling that one relationship new to this novel will continue far into Maisie’s life, on both a professional and personal basis; I’ll have to keep reading the series to find out if I’m right! As usual, recommended.
A police officer is found comatose in her home, and then dies in hospital; the autopsy reveals that she was a victim of FGM, a horrendous practice in the culture of her birth country. Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Lynley and his team, including Detective Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, investigate the death, soon determined to have been murder, and their search takes them into the murky world of the treatment of women in some of London’s racialized communities…. There’s much to be said for Ms. George having the courage to write about such a relentlessly difficult subject as female genital mutilation and to portray a Nigerian community as if from the inside out, but I had some problems with the book: first, at just shy of 700 pages, it’s massive; I think some of the numerous subplots could have been condensed or dispensed with altogether. Second, I’m getting so sick of Tommy and his increasingly ridiculous love life - he’s been a mess since Helen’s death (9 books ago) and as a plot point, it’s gotten really old by now. Third, Barbara and Winston seem to be almost caricatures at this point, she with the constant bad diet and blundering behaviours, he with the dropped “t’s” with every other word or so. Also, Deborah St. James is crucial to this outing, but her husband Simon is barely mentioned. However, all of these quibbles relate to the fact that this series has been going on for a very long time, since the 1990s in fact, and by this entry, the 21st, I know these characters all too well. Which is to say, I still buy these books the instant they come out, in hardcover, which tells readers of this review that I’m committed to this series. If you’ve been reading the series, you’ll want this one; I can’t quite imagine someone getting to know these characters for the first time through this book, though, as it’s quite an ordeal in both length and subject material.
When the body of an American cartographer is unearthed by a farmer in France, the man’s parents ask Maisie Dobbs to go through the papers accompanying the body and, if possible, find the young lady with whom their son had apparently been in love almost 20 years before. Maisie’s search uncovers far more than she expected, and the information she develops places both the man’s parents and Maisie herself in mortal danger…. This is the seventh Maisie Dobbs story, and one of the most poignant: aside from the mystery itself, Maisie finds both love and death in her personal life, and some huge changes in her circumstances. I have been enjoying these books, particularly with respect to how each character feels like a fully developed person complete with all the complex emotions each human being harbours; in that regard, this one may be my favourite so far. Recommended!
Maisie Dobbs is asked by Brian Huntley of the Secret Service to work undercover as a philosophy teacher at St. Francis College in Cambridge, in order to determine if there are seeds of political or social revolution being planted in the young. However, when the founder of the college, a pacifist whose dream was to build a peaceful world by bringing the young of all nations together to study, is murdered, Maisie’s job grows to encompass aid to Scotland Yard in addition to her clandestine assignment. While she is excited to be in a new role, she is disturbed at what she uncovers, and she knows that she may not be able to extricate herself from the underbelly of state secret forces once she’s drawn in…. In this, the eighth book in the series, Maisie is coping not only with a change in her professional status but also with her new wealth, her growing relationship with James, the son of her benefactress, and the possibility that her father may himself be courting, too; quite a plateful for our Maisie! I found this novel to be less disturbing than the previous two, although the intermittent mentions of the rising politician in Germany in 1932 is, of course, most worrisome - not least because of the reactions of some English people from various classes. It’s a good reminder that historical events do not rise in a vacuum but rather occur in a specific context, which is very well delineated here; recommended.
When a man from Maisie’s childhood is killed in an industrial accident, his friends band together to ask Maisie to look into the death; the man had been considered “simple,” but was dearly loved by many in the neighbourhood and known for his gentle touch with horses. Before too long, Maisie finds herself embroiled not only in old neighbourhood feuds, but in modern politics and the increasing worries about what might come from Germany’s new chancellor, not to mention her relationship with James Compton and where it may be heading…. I enjoyed the depictions of working-class and working poor neighbourhoods in this novel, the ninth in the Maisie Dobbs series, and I especially liked the way the world of work, which had heretofore relied upon horses for labour and transportation, is slowly being transformed by the increasing use of automobiles (and the attendant environmental changes that causes). I was less enamoured of the political aspects of the story, primarily because I am quite averse to stories involving the Second World War; even though this story takes place in 1933, long before that conflict, the seeds were being sewn during this period and so those politics were inescapable if this novel was to be true to its time period. That aside, it’s another good entry in this series; recommended.
I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Valentine and Roderick DeVere are in the top echelon of New York City society - well, Roderick is anyway, as his ancestors had been there since before the settlement was called New Amsterdam; Val is from the West, where her father amassed a fortune from silver mining and whose money has rescued the DeVere’s from financial embarrassment. One of the perks of their position is their proximity to the new Central Park, an expansive area ostensibly open to all but in reality primarily the purview of the rich. When several young women are found in the Park strangled to death, and a variety of bombings and incidents of arson also plague the area, Val decides to come to the aid of Detective Finlay, a morose police officer whose job is in jeopardy if he cannot solve the crimes. But without more information, Val risks becoming a crime victim herself…. This is the first novel in a projected series by Cecelia Tichi, and it is clear that she knows her place and period; she has written about the Gilded Age (and about cocktails, which feature throughout this novel) in her role as an academic. I very much enjoyed Val’s feistiness, which is inextricable from her Western roots, and Roddy’s swings between fond husband and upright member of Society are very amusing, although I don’t know enough about the period to know if Val could really have had the degree of freedom that she does in this book. Nevertheless, I look forward to reading more of this couple and their adventures - not to mention those of their dog Velvet! Recommended.
And we end January wishing all a Happy Imbolc!