Book Review: Birds of a Feather

Author: Jacqueline Winspear

Title: Birds of a Feather

Description: Maisie Dobbs is hired by a wealthy man to find his adult daughter who has a habit of bolting from the house. Meanwhile, several young women of the same age turn up dead, and Maisie wonders if there is a connection. This book is the second of the Maisie Dobbs books (I haven’t read any of the others) and is set in post-WWI England.

Review source: This was one of the picks for our book group.

Plot: It was interesting to follow Maisie and her acquaintances as they traced the connections in the central mystery, but the author unfairly held information from the reader (which it really wouldn’t have mattered if she had given the reader—it wouldn’t have spoiled the mystery). I don’t like cheap tricks like that.

Characters: I wasn’t overly fond of Maisie as detective.  She is very interested in the young science of psychology, which is well and good, but she takes it further into some kind of mysticism (a friend told me that this is made clearer in the first book). So she sits in rooms and examines auras and gets visions and weird (unnecessary) stuff like that. There was a love triangle developing throughout the book, but I didn’t really care.

Writing style: It’s a historical mystery, so think Anne Perry, with some added supernatural mumbo-jumbo, some teasing of the reader, and weaker characters.

Audience: people who like historical mystery.

Wrap-up: Another book that I wouldn’t have picked up except for the book group, so take the rating with that in mind. 2.5/5*