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April 1, 2022

George Ernsberger
Posted 4/1/22

A Sunlit Weapon: A Maisie Dobbs Mystery by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper).

This classic series keeps finding ways to get richer. There’s a crime to be solved, as usual, but this is more a …

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April 1, 2022

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A Sunlit Weapon: A Maisie Dobbs Mystery by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper).

This classic series keeps finding ways to get richer. There’s a crime to be solved, as usual, but this is more a historical novel than a mystery (that balance seems to me to shift a bit, from book to book). Here, there are social and political issues to be understood for Maisie to operate successfully. It’s early in World War II (we first met Maisie just after WWI, remember). The mystery opens on a woman finding a man held captive in a barn in the British countryside; the man is (and this all becomes entirely relevant), American, and Black, and a soldier in what was then a segregated U. S. Army. Maisie has become not only a free-lance investigator, but a woman with connections (remember her marriage, a couple of books ago?). A lot more goes on in this novel than what’s directly connected to that soldier, then, some in Maisie’s family. I’ve thought fairly carefully about it, and have this advice: If you haven’t got into this series before, go ahead and start here; if you’re hooked, then, look for earlier ones and read in any order. There may be a particular pleasure, but no urgency, to follow her chronologically.

Under Lock and Skeleton Key by Gigi Pandian (Minotaur).

This is to be the first of a new series of this accomplished writer. She gives us a terrifically likable central character, a young woman whose career as a stage magician isn’t going well. This book is impressively intricate—it calls itself a secret-staircase mystery, and the designer/manufacturer of secret staircases (and the like), our magician/detective’s uncle, is sure to be a central figure throughout. It’s a masterfully made locked-room mystery—physically more elaborate than that, but with that sort of seemingly impossible premise. Early reviews call John Dickson Carr to mind, appropriately, but the truth is this book (at least) is better than those classics, because it has characters to believe in and care about.

All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes (Emily Bestler/Atria).

A beautiful and scary historical novel—an ocean-going adventure, but then also a horror novel. The white spaces are those of Antarctica, and when a ship is stranded there, much emerges that’s not just icy but murderous. The central character/narrator here, a trans man (though no such term or even conception existed in that era), is another we’ll remember warmly.

The Match by Harlan Coben (Grand Central).

This new novel is a sequel to his great, sort-of-spooky novel about the man called Wilde, who emerged from the woods as a boy with no idea of who he was. (That was in the Ramapo mountains, remember—our part of the planet, and a place where any number of folklore mysteries seem to have their headquarters.) A lot of Coben finds its way onto NetFlix these days; maybe this one, too; but his best readers won’t wait for that.

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