Book review: Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2017 was Among the Mad, the sixth book in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  The book opens with a suicide bomber, which I instinctively dismissed as an anachronistic attempt at cultural relevancy before I remembered that these were the times of the anarchist movement.  It becomes quickly clear, however, that the mastermind behind the incident really is a terrorist in the modern sense of the word, threatening (and carrying out) acts of revenge against the government and British public he holds responsible for the Great War.  (I don't even consider that a spoiler.  This is a Maisie Dobbs book: of course everything revolves around World War I.)

Maisie is recruited by Special Branch, an elite division of Scotland Yard, to help find the perpetrator and stop the attacks.  (And we all know that by "help" we mean that Maisie is going to do it all on her own.)  The long-suffering Billy Beale's wife Doreen is institutionalized after sinking into a deep depression over the death of her daughter, largely so the author can contrast the sad state of mental health at the turn of the century with the modern techniques coming into vogue as mid-century approaches.  The new approach is personified by a woman doctor, but any feminism that might imply is more than undone by Winspear's treatment of Doreen as mentally weak and irrational.  (But, see, Doreen's a lower-class woman, unlike the well-educated Dr. Master, so that's okay then.  Just like child-rearing is beneath the dignity of a career woman, but it's totally okay for poor women to spend their lives providing child care for richer women's children.)