Winspear, Jacqueline: Birds of a Feather

Book cover detail:

Jacqueline Winspear's marvelous and inspired debut, Maisie Dobbs, won her fans from coast to coast and raised her intuitive and resourceful heroine to the ranks of literature's favorite sleuths. Birds of a Feather finds Maisie on another dangerously intriguing adventure in London between the wars. It is the spring of 1930, and Maisie has been hired to find a runaway heiress. When three of the heiress's old friends are found dead, Maisie must race to find out who would want to kill these seemingly respectable young women before it's too late. As Maisie investigates she discovers that the answers lie in the unforgettable agony of the Great War.

This book is as good as the first, and lends even more insight into the world of the time and life after WWI. Details of the times that I first learned about in one of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody books. To reveal it here would be to give away an important plot detail in the book, so read it and find out.

Jacqueline Winspear is rapidly joining the ranks of my favorite authors. I enjoy a good read that requires me to pay attention to even some of the smallest details. She delves into a spiritual level of investigation that insists that we each take stock in our own intuition and instincts. That to deny them or to push them aside as not worthy or notice is to deny part of ourselves, and part of our inherent warning system. Maisie Dobbs is a character that prompts us to use more of our "brain power", our intellect, our observations, our gut urges, etc. Brava!

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Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894). A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. 1913.

38. From a Railway Carriage


FASTER than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle,

All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain 5

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by.


Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself and gathering brambles; 10

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And there is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart run away in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill and there is a river: 15

Each a glimpse and gone for ever!



(quoted in Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear)