by Jacqueline Winspear
A Sunlit Weapon is the seventeenth entry in the Maisie Dobbs detective series. If you like historical fiction and traditional detective stories, and you haven’t heard of this series, you are in for a treat! At this point in the series, time has progressed from the late 1920s into World War II. The mystery concerns pilots crashing in a rural area under unusual circumstances, and Winspear brings her trademark in-depth research into play on the topics of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) and segregation in the American armed forces stationed in Britain during the war. I knew a lot about the ATA (as the author acknowledges, it has been the subject of many books), but far less about how American MPs enforced segregation on foreign soil.
Likes: Maisie is still one of the most sympathetic detectives in the business, and she’s surrounded by a formidable cast of long-term secondary characters. I enjoyed the historical detail immensely; with Winspear you know that everything has been vetted to the highest degree. The mystery involves kidnapping, murder, possible fifth column action or spying, and a high-level real-life American who’s just perfect in a series about an independent woman who’s ahead of her time. You can enjoy this one without having read the prior books, but they’re so good I hope anyone new to the series starts back at the beginning.
Dislikes: I just had two minor quibbles. One is that Maisie’s husband is sometimes referred to by his last name, which seems rather strange, given their intimacy. The second is more to do with the demands of writing a book that’s part of a series but that needs to be able to be read as a “standalone.” Series authors must find a way to fold in exposition about previous books’ plot points, and Winspear mostly does this quite deftly, until a section at the end about Maisie’s “final accounting.” It’s series-specific, but I found it hard to credit that after seventeen books, Maisie’s assistant Billy would still have questions about it – next time I hope a new character can be the one to ask about the process.
FYI: violence, kidnapping, attempted murder, racial segregation.
Liz Helfrich 