Published: August 20, 2008 05:32 pm         

Winspear's 'An Incomplete Revenge' takes different direction

Jacqueline Winspear has done it again. In “An Incomplete Revenge”, she’s managed to re-invent Maisie Dobbs, but keep her recognizable as our favorite psychologist and investigator.

As the fifth novel of the series opens, Maisie seems more relaxed, more carefree than we have heretofore seen her. Her case this time seems fairly straightforward.

Maisie’s friend, James Compton, son of her former employers, Lord Julian and Lady Rowan Compton, has a business proposition for Maisie. The Compton Corporation is thinking of buying an estate in Heronsdene that produces bricks, but there’s been some crime in the area, including fires that occur around the same time each year. What’s strange is the locals won’t talk about it, not even to the police, except to blame the fires on the outsiders who come in to pick hops: the Londoners and the gypsies. James wants Maisie to look into it and find out what’s behind it all.

Maisie enlists the help of her assistant, Billy Beale, who’s family has a tradition of picking hops in the area, so they are known there and he won’t raise suspicion if he keeps his ears open and asks a few discreet questions.

It isn’t long before Billy requests that Maisie herself come to help straighten out the latest mess in Heronsdene and Maisie finds that the events of the present have roots in the past.

Maisie continues to deal with things in her personal life when her friend, Priscilla Evernden Partridge, gives Maisie news about an old friend that Maisie doesn’t want to hear. Maisie must realize that it’s time to let go of old hurts and re-fashion relationships in different molds.

Once again, Winspear subtly intertwines the events of Maisie’s personal life with the circumstances of the case she is investigating. Maisie’s past has always played a part in these stories, but this time, it’s not her personal past so much as it is her background that comes into play. Winspear finally reveals where Maisie’s nearly infallable insight comes from and why she’s so good at her job.

Winspear always works little gems into her novels, lessons to be learned about life, and she does it here, too: observations about prejudice, guilt, and mob mentality — the way the Partridge brothers are set upon at school because they are different from their schoolmates — and how it can go horribly wrong if the situation is not corrected promptly.

As always, Winspear echoes the times in which her stories are set: 1930s Britain after the Great War (World War I), a time when not all the wounds of battle have yet healed and differences in social class can seem as set in stone as any medieval castle.

I marvel again at the knack Winspear displays in incorporating even the most innocuous storyline into the moral of her tale. Everything ties together in the end.

Jacqueline Winspear continues to spin stories that, although set in the past, give us timeless insight and “An Incomplete Revenge” follows nicely in that tradition.