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When people ask me to recommend an author, one name consistently comes to mind: Jacqueline Winspear.
Winspear writes a mystery series set in post-World War I London featuring a psychologist and investigator named Maisie Dobbs.
Messenger of Truth is the fourth book in the series, following Maisie Dobbs (2003), Birds of a Feather (2004) and Pardonable Lies (2005).
What makes the British-reared, award-winning Winspear so special is her ability to write convincing historical fiction.
Going beyond the correct details about headgear and slang from the 1920s and 1930s, she convincingly captures the interior lives of her characters.
The extraordinary carnage of World War I did not just kill men. The violence destroyed accepted ideas about valor, duty, class, human behavior and whether the future even mattered. Winspear conveys the social and economic upheaval caused by the war, the good and bad.
The vehicle is her heroine, Maisie Dobbs. Dobbs has risen above her working-class background because of her intelligence and the assistance of mentors.
A battlefield nurse during the war, Dobbs saw firsthand the bloodshed and its effect on survivors and their families.
While solving mysteries in previous books, Dobbs has dealt with the war's fallout: drug abuse, grief-stricken families embracing occultism, the rejection of physically and emotionally wounded soldiers and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In Messenger of Truth, Dobbs is hired to investigate the case of a controversial painter who fell to his death while preparing for a major art show.
The case involves bohemian English aristocrats, rich Americans, the effect of the war on artists and writers, veterans' disillusionment with their generals and government and the turmoil created by the Great War, as it was known. British fascist leader Oswald Mosley has a cameo.
Winspear is similar to Ellis Peters, who wrote the marvelous Brother Cadfael mysteries of medieval England. Cultural texture, not plot, is their strong suit. They are why-they-done-it books, not whodunits. Of the four Maisie Dobbs novels, Messenger of Truth has the least compelling murder mystery.
On the plus side, Maisie seems to be evolving into a more interesting and complicated person in her love life and friendships.
Because of the soldiers killed or permanently wounded, a surplus of almost 2 million British women would have to find an alternative to marriage and children. Maisie Dobbs is one of them.
In this series, Winspear chronicles the uncharted, sometimes rocky path chosen by her protagonist and delivers results that are educational, unique and wonderful.
Messenger of Truth
By Jacqueline Winspear
Henry Holt, 322 pp., $24
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