Book review: Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear

The twenty-fifth book I read in 2016 was the second book in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, Birds of a Feather.  I'm already wondering how far the author can go connecting mysteries to World War I; so far, all of Maisie's investigations have their origin point in the Great War.   In this book, a self-made man who rose from rags to riches in the grocery business hires Maisie to locate his heiress daughter, who has a history of running away from home.  What seems to be a frivolous case turns quickly foreboding when former friends of the missing woman start turning up murdered.

On the plus side, there's not another flashback to Maisie's salad days.  In the negative column, the whole "Maisie is psychic" angle gets played up even more.  Now her affinity to the spiritual realm is even cited as a reason Maurice took her on in the first place, when the extended flashback in the previous book didn't mention her gifts in that area until after she was already well advanced in her education.  And Billy is an opium fiend!  Only not really; he was accidentally overdosed when he was injured in the war and has suddenly started using again though no fault of his own: it was the war, you see....

I'm going to spoil the resolution a bit, so here's a bit of space if you don't care to be spoiled.

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

So the whole thing has to do with the white feather tradition and a bereaved family member blaming those who shamed young men into joining up by giving them a feather, implying cowardice, for not being in uniform.  But as Maisie herself admits, those who didn't enlist voluntarily would have been drafted eventually anyway.  We seem to be supposed to sympathize with the murderer (it was the war, you see...), but it's hard to figure why the villain/victim decides to kill so long after the deaths in question.  It's hardly sudden passion.