A dangerous place
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability -- and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father Frankie Dobbs is not getting any younger. But on a ship bound for England, Maisie realizes she isn't ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain who warns her, "You will be alone in a most dangerous place," she disembarks in Gibraltar. Though she is on her own, Maisie is far from alone: the British garrison town is teeming with refugees fleeing a brutal civil war across the border in Spain. Yet the danger is very real. Days after Maisie's arrival, a photographer and member of Gibraltar's Sephardic Jewish community, Sebastian Babayoff, is murdered, and Maisie becomes entangled in the case, drawing the attention of the British Secret Service. Under the suspicious eye of a British agent, Maisie is pulled deeper into political intrigue on "the Rock"--Arguably Britain's most important strategic territory -- and renews an uneasy acquaintance in the process. At a crossroads between her past and her future, Maisie must choose a direction, knowing that England is, for her, an equally dangerous place, but in quite a different way.
Reviews with the most likes.
In the eleventh Maisie Dobbs story, Maisie is on the way home to England when she decides to stop for a while in Gibraltar. This is a damaged Maisie, not the indomitable force we became used to in previous books. In the four years since she left England, she has taken some serious blows and still isn't ready to face home and family again. She wants to pause and rest.
Of course that isn't in the cards. Almost immediately after arriving, Maisie literally stumbles over the body of a freshly murdered man. The local police soon rule that the man, a local photographer, was killed by an unknown vagrant intent on robbery and that the matter is closed. Maisie isn't satisfied and starts looking into the murder on her own.
Things escalate. It is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing right next door. The death of the photographer seems somehow related. Maisie soon finds herself in a tangled web involving espionage, arms smugglers, lies, and secrets. The British secret service also takes an interest in her activities.
Maisie must move with care, but perhaps a case and a cause is what Maisie needs to put her life back together.
Aside: This is the lowest rated book in the series here on GoodReads. It seems that some of the fans of the series had trouble dealing with the changes Maisie had been through in her years away. Hence a lot of one and two star ratings. IMHO, those readers are dead wrong. This is actually one of the stronger books in the series.
4.5 stars rounded up.
