Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability -- and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father Frankie Dobbs is not getting any younger. But on a ship bound for England, Maisie realizes she isn't ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain who warns her, "You will be alone in a most dangerous place," she disembarks in Gibraltar. Though she is on her own, Maisie is far from alone: the British garrison town is teeming with refugees fleeing a brutal civil war across the border in Spain. Yet the danger is very real. Days after Maisie's arrival, a photographer and member of Gibraltar's Sephardic Jewish community, Sebastian Babayoff, is murdered, and Maisie becomes entangled in the case, drawing the attention of the British Secret Service. Under the suspicious eye of a British agent, Maisie is pulled deeper into political intrigue on "the Rock"--Arguably Britain's most important strategic territory -- and renews an uneasy acquaintance in the process. At a crossroads between her past and her future, Maisie must choose a direction, knowing that England is, for her, an equally dangerous place, but in quite a different way.
Well... After the last few novels and Masie having to make choices about her future and the author pulls the rug out from under her in the first 10 or so pages, I found it somewhat jarring and discomfiting.
Maisie goes from Canada to India and sails back (via the Suez canal) to England but when the boat stops in Gibraltar she decides to stop off and stay ther for a while, feeling a huge pressure to deal with the past and present. And then she falls over (quite literally) a body. She is sure that the dead man is not as he seems and with the Spanish Civil War next door she gets involved in complex politics of the era and human drama as it plays out.
The beginning jarred but overall it was an interesting read.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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7 September, 2018:
Finished reading
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7 September, 2018:
Reviewed