Book review: Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-third book I read in 2018 was the 12th Maisie Dobbs book by Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich.  As indicated by the cover art, Winspear is finally beginning to leave World War I behind and move on to World War II. 

Maisie has at last quit moping over the deaths of her not-very-lamented late husband and  unborn child and returned to England, where recurring characters Robbie MacFarlane and Francesca Thomas recruit and train her for an undercover mission: entering Nazi Germany in disguise to retrieve a British businessman consigned to Dachau.  Concurrently (because we must have a B-plot), she is retained by the hated Otterburn family to retrieve the daughter Maisie blames for her husband's death from a dissolute life in Munich.

The Nazi angle adds a much needed sense of danger and moral purpose to the series, which has tended to focus too much on the regrets of the past.  Of course Maisie actually meets Hitler, and of course she is prescient enough to discern the Jewish heritage of a British subject in the diplomatic service and urge his immediate departure, but the Mary Sueness of Maisie takes a back seat to the actual stakes of the action in this installment.  It's a shame, given both her and her author's success in the spy genre, that Maisie ends the book by swearing off further involvement with the secret service, but we can hope that patriotism will persuade her otherwise before VE Day.