A Memorial Day Book Review

Memorial Day is a time of remembrance to honor those who have fought and died for this country. Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobb series is set in England at the outset during WWI and focuses on the following decades’ events leading up to WWII. Although told from the English perspective, as allies, much of the loss and effect of WWI that Winspear brings to her fiction is equally true for Americans.

There are many reasons why this series is special. Winspear combines the horrors and chaos of war and its effects on relationships, investigation and romance, comingling historical fact with fiction. Yes, I am one who likes mixing genres. To me, the mix brings authenticity to books, as if I were living their lives, not focusing on one aspect of their life as an investigator.

The series starts before WWI and then follows Maisie after the war as she relives her experiences and starts her investigative practice. Winspear doesn’t spare the reader, showing the effects of WWI’s brutal fighting tactics and the equally brutal surgical techniques, which keep soldiers alive when death may be more merciful. Soldiers survive catastrophic injuries only to die from secondary causes, such as bacterial infection since antibiotics had not been discovered or from drug addiction. Horrific injuries are no match for the time’s anesthetics. When Maisie employs an assistant, she learns about the black market for cocaine, which brings temporary relief from the pain of acute injuries, but she also learns of the cost and addiction that destroys those battlefield survivors’ lives.

The reader, through Maisie’s memories as a nurse in France, experiences the effects of chemical-gas warfare and trench warfare exacerbated by a lack of military and government social services, which are eventually remedied through reform laws, providing social security and veteran benefits. The medical community is incapable of coping neither with chemical-warfare exposure or from shell shock, results of trench warfare. Diagnosed initially as nerve damage, shell shock is re-diagnosed as psychiatric injury. In its infancy, psychiatry provides little healing.


In A Lesson in Secrets, the eighth novel in this series, Maisie’s investigation helps police and government intelligence organizations safe-guard national security by her enmeshment in the peace movement, at one end of the spectrum, and Nazi proponents, on the other. In doing so, the Winspear reminds the reader of the forces culminating in WWII were rooted from WWI. Such lessons must not be forgotten in today’s global conflicts.


Look for other books from the series at: http://www.jacquelinewinspear.com.