I will be very curious to see where Winspear takes her character from here. I found the ending quite satisfying - it was a 'return to roots' for Maisie. I was - I am, I suppose - an advocate for the dead." ".he taught me about duty, about doing all in our power to bring a sense of.a sense of rest and calm to those left behind. This quality is one of the main reasons I have come to enjoy this character so much - her determination, her intellect, her compassion, her curiosity and her inability to let injustice go unnoticed.
This one has a great quote from Albert Einstein in the epigraph."The world is a dangerous place to live not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." And this completely defines Maisie - she is one of the people who 'do'.
It's always interesting to see why or when a title was chosen for a book. (And it's always fun to see a mention of a place in Canada that I'm familiar with - however brief!) Salazar's cafe, as she visits these locations many times. Maisie walks the streets of Gibraltar many times - I could vividly picture the old women mending their nets, Mr. Winspear's descriptions of time and place are excellent. This may just be my bias - I am not a 'spy novel' fan. But what I didn't like was the political cat and mouse games and the duplicity of almost every character. This is still present in A Dangerous Place. What I really enjoyed was what I have enjoyed in previous Maisie books - the slow coming to answers with interviews, visits and Maisie's case map. There is of course a dead body in A Dangerous Place (every mystery needs one!) But, the ensuing investigation is a political cat and mouse game with watchers watching the watched. Winspear has grown the series - and Maisie - with new directions taken in the past few books. In A Dangerous Place the route to the end is quite roundabout and busy - a bit too much in my opinion. The path is never a straight line from A to B which is of course what makes a great mystery.
I've always enjoyed the slow building and piecing together of clues on the road to the final reveal in Winspear's novels. It's 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is underway. (And truly this reader as well - I'm saddened at this turn of events.) So much so, that she has no desire to return to England - instead she only gets as far as Gibraltar.
I won't spoil it for you, but this loss devastates her. The opening first pages of A Dangerous Place were quite jarring - a great tragedy has befallen Maisie. A Dangerous Place is the latest (#11) entry in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series.
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