Winspear, Jacqueline: Pardonable Lies

Henry Holt © 2005, 352 pages [amazon]

Pardonable Lies is the third installment in Jacqueline Winspear's series of historical mysteries featuring Maisie Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator. (Read my review of Maisie Dobbs, the first book in the series.) This outing finds Maisie juggling three cases. The first and least demanding of her attention involves a fourteen-year-old girl who's been charged with murder. More interesting, and more dangerous for Maisie, are the two cases that require her to confront her ghosts. Both an old friend and a prominent barrister charge Maisie with investigating the fate of their loved ones, a brother and son respectively, who were listed among the dead of the Great War. What happened to the men in fact proves to be more interesting than anything that was reported to their families by telegram. Looking into their deaths brings Maisie back to France, which in 1930 hardly resembles the shell-shocked landscape she knew during the War, when she'd served, and nearly died, working as a nurse at a casualty clearing station.

What happened to the men in fact proves to be more interesting than anything that was reported to their families by telegram.Pardonable Lies is well written and nicely plotted and steeped in period detail. The Maisie Dobbs books are cozies, which is to say that they are gentle reads, no wallowing in the gory specifics of blood and guts. But Pardonable Lies is not a light book, exactly. Maisie is indeed haunted by her experiences in the War, as are the people she is in daily contact with. The aftershocks of a war that claimed so many lives and ripped Europe apart are felt everywhere and provide the series with an affecting backdrop. And there are occasional references in this third book to the political goings-on in Germany, the emergence of Hitler and the growing influence of the Nazi party, which remind the reader--if we'd needed the reminder--that Maisie's world is a precarious place, destined soon enough for a second terrible war. Maisie doesn't know this yet, of course, and her ignorance--the ignorance of all of Winspear's characters--adds to the book's poignancy.

As we learned in the first Maisie Dobbs mystery (I have not yet read the second), Maisie was trained in a sort of holistic detection by an enigmatic wise man, Maurice Blanche. We learn more about Maurice's history in this installment, as Maisie's investigations lead to some trouble with her mentor. Among Maisie's skills are her ability to sense an interlocutor's emotional state by adopting his or her posture--something I find a little hard to swallow but which isn't made too much of in Pardonable Lies. We also learn here that Maisie has the ability to sense the presence of spirits. We are told, in fact, that Maisie is attended by two spirits herself. Readers may find the supernatural elements in the book off-putting, but again, these are not emphasized and are not essential to the plot. My qualms about the intrusion of the supernatural into Maisie's story aside, I quite enjoyed Pardonable Lies. It won't keep you up late reading, but it's a solid, enjoyable historical.