Edging Into World War II with Maisie Dobbs in JOURNEY TO MUNICH, Jacqueline Winspear

The first Maisie Dobbs crime-solving mystery launched the former war nurse in her own private investigation business, in 1929 -- in the postwar desperation of bombed-out London and the grim almost-defeated mood of England as a whole. A trained psychologist with strong ties to her mystically inclined and very wise mentor, Maisie steps out of the noted English class system (shh! she was once a servant!!!) into a role connected with both the police and the upper classes.

In JOURNEY TO MUNICH, the 12th in the popular and highly readable series, it's 1938, nine years further away from the war that still haunts Maisie Dobbs. She's already had hints in the meantime that her home country suspects that war with Germany will be inevitable. Now the British government and the American Secret Service collude to send her into enemy territory: the city of Munich, where two missions at once call for her skills—one as agreed with the government, and the other a personal act on behalf of desperate parents.

Jacqueline Winspear sets up the plot to accomplish far more than letting readers apply their hindsight to the growing evil of the Nazi forces. Maisie's official task is to pretend she's the daughter of a British scientist who's been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, on the outskirts of the good-time city of Munich. As usual, she exceeds the assignment and delves deeply into the local resistance (portrayed in gritty and heart-pounding detail) in order to rescue this man.

Meanwhile, her effort to persuade a young woman of Canadian parents -- a grown daughter in the family that she blames for her own husband's death! -- increases Maisie's own likelihood of being fingered as a spy and captured, herself. And what game is the American agent playing in the midst of all these risks?

Winspear's readers can expect a top-notch page-turner as this skillful author draws Maisie closer to the very type of wartime conditions that still haunt her from two decades earlier. And although we can't have Maisie's intriguing mentor Maurice Blanche return to us, JOURNEY TO MUNICH demands so much from her that Maisie renews her commitment to Maurice's process of both investigating and protecting her inner integrity and calm. Best to read the other volumes first, to get the most from this one.

We who frame these books in our existing history know that the pace of the series is going to take Maisie into the Second World War, and the tension of that awareness ramps up the stakes in this volume. It's an excellent read, tightly paced, humanely inquisitive, and much deeper than the average page-turner.

If you are reading James Benn or Charles Todd, be sure to keep up with Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series -- for a very different and worthwhile face of British mystery in the fiery glow of the past century's most significant wars.

Charlie Parker Thriller, A SONG OF SHADOWS by John Connolly

US cover

With the 14th in his series of Charlie Parker suspenseful thrillers, A SONG OF SHADOWS, John Connolly has another winner: a work of crime fiction so intense and so character-driven that the strands of paranormal occurrences woven into the plot make perfect sense and effectively ramp the tension higher.

And from me, that's saying a lot, because I prefer my paranormal (I re-read Harry Potter) and my crime fiction (most of the rest of my shelves) unblended.

Connolly's Charlie Parker draws darkness toward him. We've all known someone like that. But in Parker's case, the forces of evil, enflamed by a malicious pervert with a powerful position in organized crime, have actually been hunting Parker for years. He gets in their way. Often. So do his teammates, Louis and Angel, who make the local real estate agent in the small Maine town of Boreas very nervous. Still, they manage to rent an ideal house in which Parker can recuperate, if that's possible, from the attacks that came close to ending his life and career in The Wolf in Winter (also set in Maine). It's isolated and readily defended.

Just as Parker moves into this house, where he can make his own slow rehab system to force his broken body back into action, the nearest -- but also very isolated -- house down the road also gains a tenant. Two, actually: a mother and daughter, Amanda.

Parker's casual assurance to young Amanda that she can meet and play with Parker's own daughter soon brings another potent strand of influence into the plot. Parker actually has two daughters, one dead, the other very much alive and living nearly a day's drive away with her mom on the far side of Vermont. What Parker doesn't at first realize is, Amanda's making connections with both of those daughters. And there's something else about the girls that Parker is actually scared to look at directly.

He was certain that tonight, after all he had endured, he must surely die.

A cool hand was laid on his forehead, the skin so chill as to be spangled with frost. Through his tears he saw it gleaming in the moonlight, sparkling like the light of dead stars. A voice spoke

daddy

and he felt the coldness of her breath, and smelled the scent of a world beyond this one. ... He lay on the floor in a fever dream as his dead daughter comforted him.

Despite this aspect to the book and characters, A SONG OF SHADOWS is very much traditional crime fiction: As the American cover hints, and Connolly's chapter describing Boreas's founding and enduring "German-ness," one aspect of American crime has roots in covering up for Nazi sadists who've escaped begin caught since World War II. Parker starts to realize that his neighbors have some tie to a cover-up, and he needs to sort out which side they are actually on, a challenge made tougher by the resolute silence of Amanda's mom, and repeated attacks in the region.

I couldn't put it down. Part of the reason, obviously, is Connolly's powerful writing and finely tuned pace and suspense. The other is that the face of evil, and the linked hands of the good, as Connolly depicts them -- well, there's some truth in all that. And a really good book is one that makes it all a little clearer, and proves that the successes of the good are, well, ... worth their sacrifices.

UK cover

PS -- Connolly's website is a good resource and includes Chapter 1 of the book.

The book, the movie, the book: THE GERMAN DOCTOR, Lucía Puenzo

Sometimes the whole book process gets very complicated. Established Argentinian scriptwriter Lucía Puenzo wrote The German Doctor,  which has been published in 10 languages -- then she directed and produced it as a dramatic thriller film. Now IPG (Independent Publishers Group, in its Trafalgar Square Publishing imprint) is releasing the translation in America in November.

The thriller fits into that narrow subgenre of material rooted in history, but taking place in what may be "the present." At first, all we know is that the doctor is hiding in Argentina, and is obsessed with racial purity and his experiments; he has brought his notebooks and even some samples with him, and he has a particular fondness for examples of how racial interbreeding causes genetic disasters (to his mind). And, oh yes, he's also obsessed with twins.

If you've delved into the dark horrors of the Holocaust, you already know who "José" resembles: the notorious Josef Mengele, a physician whose experiments in the concentration camps ignored scientific method and truth, and instead caused maximum distortion and pain. He's known to have fled Germany in 1945, arrived in Argentina in 1949, and when hunted by those seeking justice, he relocated first to Paraguay and then to Brazil.

In Puenzo's dark and very creepy narrative (Mengele is seducing Lilith, a 12-year-old girl who suffers from dwarfism, and he and she both are thrilled by the process), we meet José at his departure from Buenos Aires, about to cross the desert to a more welcoming and protective community of Nazi German refugees in Paraguay. The rigors of the journey provide entry for him into the not-so-innocent Lilith's family, just in time to assist with the survival of prematurely born twins.

At stake: whether Lilith will resist or encourage the final seduction, which turns out not to be sex but science; what's being perpetrated on the twin babies; how the community will react to recognizing the wicked doctor in its midst; and even a hint of suspense around whether the German doctor has any humanity in him (a Native resident sees his hollowness).

David William Foster's translation is smooth and quirky at the same time, conveying the formality and awkwardness of German into Spanish, upper class to lower, and more. Here's a sample, from the doctor's point of view as he starts to cross the desert:

When he was advised to leave Buenos Aires immediately, they had promised him at the same time that the south of Argentina was as close as he could get to German Switzerland. They spoke to him of trees, lakes, snow-covered mountains. You people were not the only ones who did a good job of cleansing, they said. They told him stories of Indian attacks that had dominated the same arid lands he was now crossing at a snail's pace, with his eyes glued to the three small blonde heads examining him out of the corner of their eyes ... He felt anguish crawling up his legs like spiders.

Whether José's sadism will be recognized, along with his unmodified facial features, continues to raise the ante; so does the arrival in the area of a Nazi hunter who knows this doctor all too well.

It's a grim book, admirably paced, and steps into one of the nastiest aspects of Argentine and world history adeptly -- we know how the doctor's story will end (he died in 1979 and was buried under a false name; his remains were verified in 1985), but this crime novel lingers within the potent years of his life in the New World. Puenzo creates Ultimate Creepy effectively, complete with dolls (see the book cover?), and tells a powerful story that, unfortunately, I will probably never forget.

And oh yes -- coming to a theatre near you. Watch for its Spanish name, too: Wakolda.