Maisie is hired by a friend of her patron, Lord Julian Compton, to investigate the supposed death of his son in -- wait for it! -- World War I! A pilot, his plane went down in occupied France, but his body was never recovered. Sir Cecil Lawton was satisfied with the official report which declared his son killed in action, but his late wife never stopped wondering if Ralph might still be alive somewhere. On her deathbed, she made her husband promise to look for him so, against his better judgment and his own wishes, he feels honor-bound to put an inquiry in motion.
Unfortunately, Maisie's investigations take her to France, which is tedious for many reasons: first, because we are introduced to one of the most annoying/precocious French children since Adèle Varens in Pascale Clement, whom we are obviously supposed to find enchanting despite her general unbearableness; second, because Maisie is still suffering from PTSD due to the experiences during the war she hasn't properly processed so we get a lot of blah-de-bloo where she passes out from the trauma of standing on the very ground where she got blown up good as a nurse and has to go through a delicate convalescence because she's just so sensitive; but third and most importantly, because that's where Maisie's horrible college friend Priscilla Evernden now lives and we have to put up with her for far more chapters than I ever wanted to see Priscilla again.
Pris, of course, is rich! and happily married to a poet! and living the glamorous expatriate life in Biarritz! and KILL ME NOW she is so insufferable. I hated her in the first book when she was just a character in an overlong flashback; having to put up with her in real time is cruel and unusual. Now, of course, she has the extra added allure of being tormented by her past! Unable to face the deaths of her brothers in the war (what war would that be, I wonder?), she lives on perpetual vacation in the south of France, and we're supposed to find her sympathetic, rather than just pathetic. Besides running away from her problems, she also smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, both of which were utterly commonplace in the time period, but since Winspear is anachronistic about mores in the books so that Maisie can be a woman ahead of her time, I'm hoping that lung cancer or liver disease will strike down Pris before her time and give Maisie's psyche further battering.
Apart from the presence of Pris, the overall lameness of the main plot, and the overused girl-power protofeminism which is getting wearing, two facets of the book are particularly egregious. The first is Maisie's sudden obsession with her dead mother. Her mother's passing was largely passed over in the first book, except for its use as a plot device to get Maisie into Lady Rowan's household. In the previous two installments, Maisie's closest and most influential relationship was portrayed as being with her father, so it comes out of nowhere here for her all of a sudden to be pining for the mother she has never mentioned before.
Of course, the reason for the abrupt focus on Maisie's mother (aside from the aforementioned feminism: perhaps Winspear took some criticism about the most respected influences in her character's life being men?) leads into the second facet I disliked: Maisie is said to have inherited her psychic abilities from her mother's side of the family, and psychics play a large and rather awkward part in this story. Ralph Lawton's mother was encouraged to believe that her son might still be alive through consultations with psychics after the war, and Maisie mentions that she and Maurice Blanche were instrumental in testifying against and shutting down psychics who preyed on the bereaved -- the false ones, that is. Because, of course, Maisie truly has 'the gift.' It's dissonant, like "real" extraterrestrials debunking all the charlatans who are hoaxing the world, or like someone denouncing the Nessie photos while claiming actually to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.
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