Book Review: Messenger of Truth

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

Messenger of Truth     Amazon US TPB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada TPB Amazon Canada HC
Jacqueline Winspear
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Woman Main Character   Historical
Series: Maisie Dobbs # 4
Henry Holt, $30.00 hardcover, 336 pages

The night before an exhibition of his art opens at the Svenson Gallery, Nick Bassington-Hope falls to his death from scaffolding he was using to position his masterwork. His twin sister Georgina, a firebrand war journalist and former Girton College student, comes to Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator. Georgie doesn’t believe the police conclusion that Nick’s death was merely an accident, and she wants Maisie to look into the incident.

Before long, the evidence leads Maisie to Dungeness, in Kent, where Nick and several artist friends made their homes in converted railway cars on the beach. Here she finds a connection between the men and certain unsavoury types, though Nick’s younger brother Harry, a jazz trumpeter. Maisie is determined to follow every lead, until the picture is clear upon the canvas of her investigation.

I first discovered Maisie Dobbs in last year’s Pardonable Lies, and was surprised that I hadn’t come across her before. Messenger of Truth is the fourth in the series. It recreates London of the early 1930s, when men and women struggled to earn enough to feed their families, when communicable disease took a terrible toll on the very young and the aged, yet also when the rich somehow managed to grow richer all the while and indulge themselves in the nightclubs and art galleries. Maisie moves between these two worlds in this book, and does it with grace and determination.

Messenger of Truth also continues Maisie’s search for independence. She has moved from the Belgravia house and into a flat of her own. It is this search that perhaps engages the reader even more than the investigation, and which promises a long life to the series.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM