Review: The Consequences of Fear

The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So here we are, the sixteenth book in the series. It's autumn 1941 and the bombs are falling on London. Young Freddie Hackett is employed to run around London delivering top secret messages by government departments. One night whilst on his way to deliver a message, Freddie witnesses a murder, and then only minutes later delivers his message to the killer ,a man who looks like the actor Victor Mature, but with deep lines in his face. The police don't believe Freddie's story, especially when there is no evidence of a body, so Freddie approaches Maisie Dobbs, detective extraordinaire to whom he has delivered messages in the past, to help him.

Maisie is having troubles of her own, her romantic liaison with Mark Scott, an American diplomat/spy is rendered increasingly difficult by the secrets they must each keep about their respective war work. Maisie is engaged by the government to vet potential SOE operatives (spies), to give them the best chance of surviving when parachuted into occupied France . It's nerve-wracking work, especially knowing that the life of a radio operator in France is measured in weeks. Then there's her step-mother Brenda who is strongly disapproving of Maisie's relationship with Mark and wants him to put a ring on it!

When Maisie is whisked away to a castle near Edinburgh to evaluate a group of potential operatives who are training alongside Free French fighters and various French Canadian and Algerian soldiers she is astonished to see a man who perfectly matches Freddie's description of the murderer but Robert Macfarlane, former Scotland Yard policeman and now SOE management refuses to listen to her, instead sending her straight back to London.

No sooner is she back in London than she discovers that Macfarlane is also on his way back, accompanying the body of one of the operatives from Scotland, it seems pretty obvious that his neck was deliberately broken before he fell off a cliff but Macfarlane is having nothing of it.

Can Maisie bring the murderer to justice? Can she uncover the motive for the murders? Can she keep Freddie and his family safe? Can she resolve her romantic difficulties?

This book is proof (for me) that reading and enjoyment of a book is about the state of mind of the reader more than anything else. I started reading this a year ago and put id down, not engaged at all. Yet I picked it up again a day or so ago and raced straight through it. I still think that Maisie is a very special Mary Sue, and I do worry for Mark seeing as she has such a bad track record with keeping lovers alive, but I can live with that because Jacqueline Winspear does such a great job of bringing the period to life.

Available on Kindle Unlimited.

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