The Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs #18) - Book Review

 

The Comfort of Ghosts
(Maisie Dobbs, Book 18)
by  Jacqueline Winspear (2024)
Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy
Audio book, 10 hrs and 6 mins

Jacqueline Winspear was born in 1955 and raised in Cranbrook, in Kent, England. She emigrated to the United States in 1990. She has stated that her childhood awareness of her grandfather's suffering in World War I led to an interest in that period - and to writing the Maise Dobbs series. 

Her character Maisie Dobbs was born a working class girl in England, but received an unusual education thanks to the patronage of her aristocratic employer, who took her on as a housemaid from when she was just in her early teens. During WWI Maisie worked as a nurse, and after that set up her own business as a private investigator. She grows older throughout the series of novels; and the stories and cases that Maise gets involved in reflect the times, from WWI through WW2. 

This 18th novel in the series is set just after the end of WWII, and I suspect it may be intended to be the last. Anyway it sums up quite a lot from the whole time period, and the ups and downs of Maisie's own life.

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Psychologist and Investigator Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, gravely ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group.

Maisie’s quest to bring comfort to the youngsters and the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie’s first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental fighter aircraft. As Maisie unravels the threads of her dead husband’s life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.

As I have read all of the earlier books (some borrowed, some in paperback, some on Kindle, and some as audio books) over a period of 20 years, it's hard for me to guess how this last novel might come across to a new reader who has not read any of the previous ones. There is quite a bit of repetition of details in this one though, so perhaps it might actually work as an "independent" read as well. 

For my own part, I'm thinking of going back and maybe get additional audio book editions of some that I don't already have in that format. I think they have all been recorded by Orlagh Cassidy now; and I like her narration.

Book Review: Maise Dobbs #9 and #10

For background on the Maise Dobbs series, see my reviews of #7, The Mapping of Love and Death (and #8, A Lesson in Secrets. Having liked #8 better than #7, I decided to go straight on from that one to the next:

 

Jaqueline Winspear: Elegy for Eddie
(Maise Dobbs #9)  (2012) ****

April, 1933. To the costermongers of London, Eddie Pettit is simply a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. When he is killed in a violent accident, the costers are sceptical about the cause of his death, and recruit Maisie Dobbs to investigate. Maisie, who has known these men since childhood and remembers Eddie fondly, is eager to help. But it soon becomes clear that powerful political and financial forces are equally determined to prevent her from learning too much about Eddie's death  ---
(From Amazon’s book description)

I found this book keeping up the standard from the previous one; the mystery concerning Eddie’s death enhances Maise’s personal struggles to get used to having climbed up quite a bit on the social ladder since her own childhood and youth.

So after finishing that one, I decided to catch up and read the most recently published book in the series too:

Leaving Everything Most Loved
(Maise Dobbs # 10)  (2013) ***

London, 1933. Some two months after an Indian woman, Usha Pramal, is found murdered in a South London canal, her brother turns to Maisie Dobbs to find the truth about her death. Not only has Scotland Yard made no arrests, but evidence indicates they failed to conduct a full and thorough investigation. ---
(From Amazon’s book description)

As usual the author is good at descriptions of the time period, and here she brings in some of the culture clashes that come with people from other parts of the Commonwealth moving to England/London to live. However, I feel that both the mystery and the background story are losing tempo again in this book. It feels too much like an interlude or “treading water” as far as Maisie’s personal life is concerned. (Of course most of us go through periods like that. But that does not necessarily mean it makes a good novel…) The book keeps pointing forward to more drastic changes coming up; but as for what will really happen, we shall have to wait until the next book to find out (the author knows by now how to keep us wondering). And that I think is a common weakness with series that just go on and on.

 

Quotes from Elegy for Eddie:

Sometimes we say we’re sad when we would be better served by using the word melancholy, for example. Sometimes anger can be more accurately described as frustration. The distinction helps us identify a path through the maze of emotion – and emotions can be debilitating, can paralyze us if we allow them power, and we do that when we fail to be precise.

I think I want to find out what it’s like to approach a corner without constantly trying to be prepared for what I might encounter when I round it.
---
Yes, it does make the load rather heavy if you carry tools for every eventuality.

 

Quote from Leaving Everything Most Loved

Maisie paused, putting the information about [---] to one side in her mind, as if moving a saucepan to another burner on the stove – it was not to be forgotten, but could simmer while her focus was on the main reason for her call.