This summer, we bid farewell to two long-running mystery series heroines who are making their marks in wartime. We’ll start with Maisie Dobbs, the plucky and resourceful British investigator and psychologist whom Jacqueline Winspear introduced in 2003, who takes her 18th and final bow in THE COMFORT OF GHOSTS (Soho Crime, 342 pp., $29.95).
It’s fall 1945, just after the end of World War II. Maisie has been asked to investigate the four orphaned teens who are squatting in the vacant, once-grand London mansion where she worked as a maid years ago. There, she inadvertently stumbles onto a decades-old mystery involving her first husband, who died while test-piloting an airplane.
Maisie’s life will be forever changed by what she discovers: “Truth had at last come to the surface, had eased itself from the boundaries of the past as if it were a splinter rising up through skin.” Winspear gives Maisie the grace to face her pain, and wraps up the series with a deft touch.
Like many readers, I will dearly miss the voice of Maisie Dobbs.
After 11 books, Susan Elia MacNeal says adieu to Maggie Hope — once Winston Churchill’s secretary and now a capable and shrewd spy — in THE LAST HOPE (Bantam, 292 pp., $29). Maggie has blossomed professionally and personally over the course of the series. But in 1944, a marriage proposal from a longtime love, John Sterling, raises the stakes — as does her latest assignment: She has been ordered to assassinate the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is part of Germany’s nuclear weapons program.
Maggie travels to Madrid, where Heisenberg will be delivering a lecture, in search of more information, and really any kind of path away from the unthinkable task. Complicating matters is the presence of Coco Chanel, who ensnares Maggie in a web of game-playing and double-dealing.
MacNeal wraps up every plot thread without giving Maggie a happily-ever-after ending, which feels right in a world on the brink. “About that question you asked me,” she tells John. “Why don’t you ask me again — when the war’s over.”
Far be it from me to say whether William Deverell’s THE LONG-SHOT TRIAL (ECW Press, 250 pp., paperback, $21.95), the ninth novel to star the quick-witted defense lawyer Arthur Beauchamp, will be his last; that said, Deverell is 87, and the book is shot through with lament and mourning.
Beauchamp, about the same age as the author, has been provoked into writing his memoirs, concentrating specifically on a 1966 case in which a young woman alleged that her employer had raped her and then shot him dead.
Beauchamp gets tasked with the case at the last minute, and he’s certain it’s not winnable. But all he needs is reasonable doubt to clear his client. As he reminisces, the present day occasionally intrudes — minor conflicts with his wife; interactions with his would-be literary agent. Deverell paces his story beautifully and weaves in somefinal surprises.
The book that has haunted me since I’ve finished it is HALL OF MIRRORS (Pegasus Crime, 323 pp., $27.95), the second volume in John Copenhaver’s trilogy featuring the crime-obsessed duo Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson. They were troubled, danger-seeking teens in the trilogy’s first installment, “The Savage Kind”; now, years later in McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., they have weathered estrangement, family disapproval and societal scorn to live as their true selves, together.
Judy — whose indelible narration covers the years in between — and Philippa are tracking the serial killer they tried and failed to thwart years ago as he continues to slake his bloodlust with young girls. No one will listen to them except their favorite crime writer, Ray Kane.
What happens when Judy and Philippa meet Ray — really Roger Raymond and Lionel Kane, writing partners and lovers — will upend all of their lives. As Copenhaver details with breathtaking skill, full exposure, however terrifying, flings open the closet doors to truth.
Finally, I’m thrilled to see more reissues of novels by Akimitsu Takagi, the Japanese crime fiction master, most recently THE NOH MASK MURDER (Pushkin Vertigo, 223 pp., paperback, $16.95). It’s a wickedly plotted mystery with a metafictional twist that feels far fresher than those of more contemporary versions with the same idea.
Here, the author is a character, an amateur crime writer and friend to the narrator. Both have been summarily dispatched to the Chizui family’s house, where a “terrible and powerful curse” hangs over an antique Noh mask, worn 200 years ago in an ill-fated performance of a classical Japanese drama. Now, the head of the Chizui household has been discovered murdered in his locked bedroom, the mask next to him and a jasmine scent wafting through the air.
This is only the first of several tragedies as the poisonous wrath between various family members — going back generations and involving abuse, duplicity and betrayal — spills out for Takagi the character to witness and investigate. Takagi the author has many more surprises in store, even as he plays ruthlessly fair with the reader.
