Pardonable Lies

Winspear, Jacqueline. Pardonable Lies.

6 words: Three mysteries for price of one.

As I've said before, I enjoy Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mysteries. Winspear develops the characters well and allows them to change and grow. In this novel, Maisie has 3 cases: a young girl accused of murder, a father who wants proof that his son died in the war, and a friend who wants to know the circumstances surrounding her brother's death during the war.

Maisie, a nurse during WWI, has suffered emotionally from her war experiences and must confront some of her demons when two of her cases require her to travel to France where she served in a field hospital. In addition to the emotional stress of revisiting the region where she experienced war's horrors, Maisie finds herself at odds with her mentor.

Winspear does an excellent job relating the devastating effects of WWI on the British and, in this novel, the French. Both countries are still, 13 years later, dealing with the suffering and loss inflicted by the war. Winspear also manages to slip a 4th minor mystery that I will leave as a surprise, but that involves the psychic phenomenon that occured during that period.


Fiction. Mystery. 2005. 352 pages.