Book review: A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-eighth book I read in 2017 was the eighth Maisie Dobbs novel, A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Maisie has inherited not only her mentor Maurice Blanche's money and property but also his value to His Majesty's Secret Service.  Detective Chief Superintendent Robert MacFarlane calls Maisie in to go undercover at a private college in Cambridge.  Its founder rose to fame by publishing a pacifist book during World War I, and the British government doesn't trust his motives in shaping the minds and morals of the next generation.

Maisie being Maisie, she has hardly gotten unpacked in Cambridge before a murder with political implications occurs.  She turns out to be not the only spy at the college.  Sandra, a former domestic in Lady Rowan's employ, asks Maisie for help when her husband dies under mysterious circumstances.  On the domestic front, Billy and Doreen have their baby, James Compton renovates 15 Ebury Place with the hopes of Maisie being its mistress, and Priscilla is throwing Maisie so hard at James's head I could scream.  In other news, James and Maisie are sleeping together regularly, seemingly without any worry about Maisie finding herself pregnant.  Winspear is eager to provide history lessons about all kinds of other things going on in the 1930s; one wonders why she is reticent on the subject of the period's methods of birth control.