Book review: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-fourth book I read in 2016 was Messenger of Truth, the fourth book in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  In it, Maisie is hired by Georgina Bassington-Hope to look into the death of her artist twin brother Nick, a death which has been deemed an accident by the authorities.  The Bassington-Hopes are a wealthy, artistic family haunted by (what else?) World War I, in which the oldest daughter's husband was killed.

There's a lot of kerfuffle about the youngest Bassington-Hope, a jazz musician, and gambling debts he owes to the criminal underworld; Nick's American client; the gallery owner; and even Georgiana herself, a writer who has been artistically blocked since the war.  When it comes down to it, however, the story behind Nick's death is somewhat less dramatic than Winspear sometimes leads us to hope during the narrative.

There's a B-plot about smugglers, which feels a bit Jamaica Inn but serves to bring Detective Inspector Stratton into the story.  Maisie finally breaks up with Andrew Dene, who has to have been among the most underdeveloped and uninteresting romantic attachments ever to have stretched lifelessly over four books of a series, the Steadman Graham of 1930s British detective fiction.  And there's a heartbreaking development in Billy Beale's family, which is supposed to make the reader feel the need of Clement Attlee and his Public Health Service but only makes me question why Maisie Dobbs, while she's swanning around England visiting country houses and jazz clubs in her MG, doesn't pay Billy enough for him to take his children to the doctor.