|
| An Incomplete Revenge: A Maisie Dobbs Novel (Maisie Dobbs Novels) | 
 enlarge | Author: Jacqueline Winspear
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy Used: $2.92
You Save: $21.08 (88%)
New (44) Used (40) Collectible (4) from $2.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 23158
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1
ISBN: 0805082158
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780805082159
ASIN: 0805082158
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: ***ex-library with usual stamps and markings*** other wise good condition All Day Low Prices! Buy From Us, Sell To Us, We Do it All!!
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In her fifth outing, Maisie Dobbs, the extraordinary Psychologist and Investigator, delves into a strange series of crimes in a small rural community With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work. As Maisie discovers, the villagers are bitterly prejudiced against outsiders who flock to Kent at harvest time—even more troubling, they seem possessed by the legacy of a wartime Zeppelin raid. Maisie grows increasingly suspicious of a peculiar secrecy that shrouds the village, and ultimately she must draw on all her finely honed skills of detection to solve one of her most intriguing cases. Rich with Jacqueline Winspear’s trademark period detail, this latest installment of the bestselling series is gripping, atmospheric, and utterly enthralling.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
speaking coincidently, speaking in tongues March 25, 2008
13 out of 19 found this review helpful
The Maisie Dobbs series is exquisitely researched and sensitively written, with the nuances of the British class system - in radical flux between the Great War and the Hitler War - embodied by the characters and their interactions. Winspear is careful to set her plots in a way that allows her to address social issues and politics while solving mysteries, and the reader always learns a great deal while having a grand read.
If there's a flaw in this jewel of a series, it's Winspear's dependence coincidence. More accurately, it's her addiction to it and her almost morbid sensitivity about the same. Not only do the plots bristle with coincidences big and small, but the narrator feels the need to explain/accommodate/apologize for these devices, even as Winspear strews them round her characters' feet. Indeed, the title of the fourth book in the series, Messenger of Truth, is part of a quote attributed to Maisie Dobbs' mentor: "Coincidence is the messenger of truth." In An Incomplete Revenge, Maisie's assistant quotes it back at her.
If coincidence were really the messenger of truth, Maisie would be the Delphic Oracle, not merely a hardworking and insightful detective. Winspear's multiple coincidences diminish the talents of the wonderful character she has created.
All readers of mysteries are prepared to accept some coincidences. They are part of the genre, and only the greatest luminaries in the field can fashion a plot without them. Winspear would do well to acknowledge this, to acknowledge it tacitly, and let us get on with our reading. Between the coincidental events and her need to make them acceptable, it sets a reader's teeth on edge.
One of the things we learn about in An Incomplete Revenge is the life and culture of the gypsies, or Roma people. Winspear has taken the trouble to acquire quite a few words of their language, and she sprinkles them liberally through the text. Sadly, the results are not felicitous. Rather than letting readers acquire meaning from context or from a quick appositive, Winspear uses repetition, writing phrases and clauses twice: "A Roma would trust anyone before a diddakio - before the half-bred people who were born of gypsy and gorja. . . . Beulah brought four tin bowls from underneath the caravan - underneath the vardo in the gypsy tongue." (2)
This becomes MASSIVELY irritating very very quickly, and it goes on and on. Furthermore, the since the repetition functions as translation, it raises the question of why Winspear uses only nouns. If we have to read through translations, it would at least be fair to give us some syntax and grammar in Anglo-Romani.
But keep reading. While the Roma discourse makes the first part of the book irritating, once the plot gets firing on all cylinders, Winspear sticks with the vocab she's already introduced, and the gypsies become an intriguing part of the multifaceted mystery.
This is a story about calling things by their right names. Things and people. The people in Winspear's books are fabulously drawn, unusual without being quaint, all of them the sort of characters who must surely have lives they keep on living once we've turned the final page. We see Pris and her pack of wild sons again in this novel, even as we lose the lost-boy, lost-love Simon. Billy and his family engage in the Londoner's working vacation, hop-picking in Kent just as Maisie has a meaty mystery to investigate there. Lots of solid background details make the countryside's beauty pull the reader into the pages, while the ever-solid Frankie Dobbs is nearby to offer Maisie (and the reader) comfort and support when things get dark.
One of the best things about the series is that things change. Maisie moves from one place to another, from one case to another, out of some relationships and on with some more. It's a sadness to end such a book, but there's comfort in knowing that we will see Billy and Pris again, while the gypsy connection looks ripe for many future tales.
 clean, tasty, sentimental, and classic March 9, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series is written from a lovely point of view. During this period between the world wars the women of England found themselves in a surplus situation of millions compared to the men who had been obliterated upon the killing fields of France. This problem was also an opportunity.
In this fifth book of the series we find Maisie trying to solve the mystery of some mysterious arson cases in a tiny village during the hop harvest. The village is a strange place, filled with an ominous sense of dread.
Maisie has been liberated in a sense occupationally by the war. Many women found new careers because there were so few men left. She also finds another form of liberation in this book, the freedom to love again.
Winspear evokes a much gentler place where discourse was less profane, crimes were less explicit, and the carnage was a tragic memory of war. Violence is implied. Language is muted. Emotions drizzle across the page like an English rain. Exquisite!
 Dowsing as Deux ex machina February 26, 2008
9 out of 18 found this review helpful
Would you read a mystery where the detective solves the case by dowsing for lost objects (and on the basis of only one lesson)? It's the sort of thing that makes me not buy the book or swear off the author.
However, it is otherwise a good book and Winspear's preceeding books, while having a touch of the irrational mental schtik, are quite good. But I'll browse the next one thoroughly before I buy.
marvelous Maisie mystery February 21, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
In 1931 business tycoon James Compton considers buying property in Heronsdene, Kent but a rash of questionable fires has left him re-evaluating his selection. He asks his friend London based investigative psychologist Maisie Dobbs to look into what seems to him as obvious the work of an arsonist. She would do anything for her mentor and besides needs the money he offers as the Great Depression has hammered at consultants like her so she agrees to visit the tiny rustic village.
Maisie quickie uncovers the suspicious dealings of a landowner while wondering why the locals refuse to speak about visiting Gypsies or a WW I zeppelin raid that killed an entire family; as the behavior is way beyond the normal suspicion of strangers. A struggling Maisie begins to tie together the townsfolk, the gypsies, the Great War and what happened afterward in remote Heronsdene, but someone is on war alert watching her every step.
The latest Dobbs between the World Wars' mystery is a terrific entry in one of the best twentieth century private investigation series. Maisie is at her best as she sleuths in a location in which no one wants her around let alone snooping. However, it is the sense of time and place that makes AN INCOMPLETE REVENGE and its four predecessors (see MESSENGER OF TRUTH, PARDONABLE LIES, MAISIE DOBBS and BIRDS OF A FEATHER) worth reading as few authors if any bring to life England in the late 1920s and early 1930s as picturesquely as Jacqueline Winspear consistently has done with the marvelous Maisie mysteries.
Harriet Klausner
An Incomplete Revenge is a great next book in the series March 3, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book picks up where the last left off, and welcomes the reader right back into the cast of characters that readers have followed throughout the series (and have come to love!) Time continues to pass, and although links to WWI are central to this book, there is some foreshadowing of trouble brewing in the future/Germany. This book is just as interesting and readable as the other Maisie Dobb's novel. Fans of previous books will not be disappointed with this novel!
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
