Among the Mad, by Jacqueline Winspear, $25. In the closing days of 1931, private investigator and psychologist Maisie Dobbs teams up with Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to find a cunning terrorist who is intent on inflicting harm to huge numbers of innocent people. Suspecting that the terrorist may be a deranged veteran of the Great War, Maisie attempts to compile a roster of recently discharged mental patients, racing against time as their target makes it clear he is planning a cataclysmic event.
Her investigation also leads her to state-of-the-art chemical warfare, with which the terrorist is well-acquainted, and to the darker side of her government’s experiments with lethal agents.
A poignant subplot involves her assistant, Billy, whose wife, Dora, has sunk so far into melancholia after the loss of their child that she has been incarcerated in a barbaric asylum, and Maisie tries to get her removed to a more humane facility. Maisie is also beginning to acknowledge the loneliness of the life she has fashioned for herself and starts tentatively to reach out to new people.
It’s not easy to write so affectingly about a heroine as kind, resourceful and intelligent as Maisie, but the author continues to pull it off, leaving us, as always, eager for the next book in the series.
The Adversary, by Michael Walters, $15 (trade paperback). Like its predecessor, this gripping second case for Nergui — the former head of the Serious Crime Team, and his replacement, Doripalam — is set in Ulan Baatar, the capital of post-Soviet Mongolia and a city caught between Eastern and Western cultures and between modern and ancient times.
It’s a complex, fast-paced tale that opens with the trial of an elusive crime lord, Muunokhoi, which the presiding judge is forced to adjourn because the prosecution’s case rests on forged evidence.
Tunjin, the overweight, alcoholic cop who is responsible, becomes a target of Muunokhoi and his gangsters, and he becomes a most unlikely hero as he flees his pursuers into the surrounding steppes on a borrowed motorcycle. Also hiding out in the lush green steppes is a family of nomads who have information on the murder of one of their own, a middle-aged woman whose teenage son has gone mysteriously missing.
Thanks to the author’s skillful plotting, the two cases eventually dovetail, with a satisfactory twist at the end.
Equally impressive are the nuanced characterizations: the dapper, suave Nergui, who may now be a bureaucrat but at heart is still a cop; Doripalam, conscientious but skeptical of his former boss’ motives, especially at the goading of his ambitious wife; and the terrified Tunjin, a perpetual loser who finally regains his self-respect.
But even more memorable than the plot and the characters is the setting, the endless steppes that shade into towering mountains and the vast Gobi Desert. The unlovely city of Ulan Baatar, with its Soviet-style cinder-block buildings, is blighted by comparison, but it’s home to the forces of law and order in the land, as well as its criminal hub.
Silent on the Moor, by Deanna Raybourn, $13.95 (trade paperback). The young widow Julia Grey can’t leave well enough alone. It’s 1888, two years after the murder of her husband (which she solved with the aid of enigmatic private inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane), and she’s determined to visit Brisbane at his newly acquired estate on the Yorkshire moors, despite all his admonitions to stay away.
When she and her unconventional sister, Portia, arrive at Grimsgrave Hall, Julia is dismayed at its state of disrepair and by the lukewarm welcome Brisbane extends to her.
He is, of course, only trying to distance her because of the disparity in their social standing, but naturally this only makes her want him more. He’s reluctantly sharing the manor with its former owners, an aristocratic but impoverished family who have nowhere else to go, and Julia wiles away her time unraveling the family’s secrets as she examines their late brother’s collection of Egyptian antiquities.
When Brisbane’s life is threatened, Julia springs into action, discovering more about his gypsy roots and eventually forcing a resolution to the tension between them.
Like its predecessors, “Silent on the Moor” is unabashedly romantic but still very much a literary Victorian detective novel that will certainly delight the author’s fans.
Tom and Enid Schantz are freelancers who write regularly about new mystery releases.
