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Pardonable Lies

by Jacqueline Winspear

In Pardonable Lies, Jacqueline Winspear has created a situation all too well known even today, although her protagonist, Masie Dobbs, lives in the London of 1930. Ms. Winspear's Maisie Dobbs is a very interesting, original sleuth far different from either a Miss Marple, Deborah Knott, Agatha Raisin, V. I. Warshawski or any other well-known female detective character you can name. Jacqueline Winspear has endowed Maisie with
a very special kind of intuition as well as a comprehensive understanding of the human condition – something seldom found in any protagonist. Being a woman detective back in the 1930's could hardly have been easy in either America or in England, but Ms. Winspear pits her protagonist up against laws and situations which would no longer be relevant by today's standards, and does it with grace and aplomb.

Pardonable Lies is the third of Jacqueline Winspear's novels featuring Maisie Dobbs. In it, Maisie (whose card indicates she's an Investigator and a Psychologist) is introduced to Sir Cecil Lawton, QC, who reluctantly hires her to fulfill a promise to his wife, now dead. The mission requires Maisie to travel to France. The Lawton's son Ralph was an aviator who evidently died there in a fiery plane crash during World War I, but Mrs. Lawton has always felt her son was still alive. Mrs. Lawton went to less-than-reputable fortune-tellers and mediums to prove it. She made her husband promise to find her son.

Then Maisie finds herself with other commissions as well. Her best friend Priscilla wants her to discover the truth about her brother Peter, who died in the same war, and Maisie is also concerned about a young thirteen-year-old girl named Avril, unjustly accused of murdering her pimp. Two of the situations are later discovered to be intimately related, and the 'pardonable lies' are told to Sir Cecil in the end.

Jacqueline Winspear is a real find. As unusual as her character of Maise is – especially in that time period – Ms. Winspear has created her as a very real, warm and sympathetic individual. The other characters in Pardonable Lies are no less convincing. Jacqueline Winspear writes well and knowledgeably about a period of history requiring avid research as well as complete understanding of the morals and mores at that time. Fans of Maisie Dobbs will certainly increase after reading Ms. Winspear's Pardonable Lies.

Alan Paul Curtis

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