An Incomplete Revenge, by Jacqueline Winspear, $24. It’s hop-picking time in Kent, and whole families of Londoners are packing up their belongings and moving into huts in the hop fields to bring in the harvest. Among them is Maisie Dobbs’ right-hand man, Billy Beale, gone undercover to help Maisie investigate a potential land deal that one of her friends has hired her to look into.
Maisie, a former servant turned university student then nurse in World War I, and finally a private detective, is puzzled by a series of mysterious fires and petty crimes that have plagued the small village of Heronsdene since a stray zeppelin destroyed a house and an entire family during the war.
It’s 1930 and hard times have come to all of England, so Maisie is glad to have the work, but it turns out to be a puzzling case, indeed, not made any easier by the veil of secrecy the villagers have drawn around themselves.
There is a poignant subplot involving the fate of Maisie’s former lover, a shell-shocked veteran hospitalized since the war in a near- vegetative state, as well as much colorful and interesting information about the gypsies who join the villagers and Londoners in the harvest.
Altogether, Maisie is in fine fettle here, kindhearted and self-assured as ever, and the author’s lively and graceful prose, strong sense of time and place and her ability to create believable and sympathetic characters make the book a joy to read.
Silent in the Sanctuary, by Deanna Raybourn, $13.95. In the winter of 1887 the recently widowed Lady Julia Grey is summoned from Italy to her father’s home in Sussex to celebrate the Christmas holidays in the company of her many wildly eccentric siblings and a few more distant relations. Also present, to Julia’s dismay, is the enigmatic Nicholas Brisbane, the private enquiry agent who helped her track down her husband’s murderer in the first book of the series.
The home in question is a converted abbey, complete with secret passages, a gloomy chapel and even a resident ghost. When a socially ambitious young curate is found murdered in the chapel, a penniless young cousin confesses to the crime, but Julia is convinced that the woman is innocent and persuades her father to let her help Nicholas investigate.
Tension mounts as the abbey is cut off from the outside world by a raging snowstorm and it becomes clear that the killer is still very much at large.
The very familiarity of its ingredients is part of the charm of this witty and entertaining story. Every character comes alive, especially Julia and her close-knit family, who embrace social conventions when it suits them and discard them when they don’t.
Fans of English historical suspense with a touch of romance couldn’t do better than this.
The Shanghai Tunnel, by Sharan Newman, $24.95. The author of the Catherine LeVendeur medieval mysteries has turned her talent for historical research and her feminist perspective on the past to a new series, set in 1868 Portland, Ore., and featuring a newly minted widow, Emily Stratton, fresh from Shanghai with her teenage son, Robert.
The daughter of missionaries, Emily was freed from a nightmarish 18-year marriage to a brutal and venal man, Horace Sutton, when he died suddenly after returning with his family to the U.S. She is fortunate that he left her well provided for; she’s not so fortunate that his business partners are every bit as unscrupulous as Horace and don’t welcome her probing into his affairs.
She and Robert settle in Horace’s well-appointed mansion in Portland, a wide-open town where Emily, who speaks fluent Mandarin and has a fondness for Chinese dress and cuisine, soon becomes well-known.
She knew that her late husband was a monster in his private life, but she is still appalled to learn exactly how his fortune was amassed. In her investigation of his business dealings, she encounters just about every social evil of the time, including the merciless exploitation of Chinese immigrants, the opium trade and forced prostitution. And the more she learns, the greater the danger she puts herself into.
Occasionally the author’s love of scholarship leads her to incorporate some superfluous details and characters into the otherwise compelling story, but Emily is a stubborn and compassionate woman whose disdain for Victorian fashion and social prejudices will surely appeal to modern readers.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a regular column on new mysteries.
