TLC Book Tour: Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear

" Early April 1933. To the costermongers of Covent Garden--sellers of fruits and vegetables on the London streets- Eddie Pettit was a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. So who would want to kill him.... and why?"



Back in more-than-fine form, Winspear returns to the world of intrepid female detective Maisie Dobbs: juxtaposing Maisie's personal past and present with her penchant for uncovering the truth.  Those who enjoy thinking, atmospheric mysteries with a flair for the perfect world of 1930s elegance, will sink their teeth deep into this latest endeavour.

It's hard, as we with insatiable appetites for mysteries know, to keep a series striding and fresh near ten books in...and yet Winspear makes every outing with Maisie, Priscilla and all fresh and captivating. More still, and unpretentiously, she slyly slides in the figure of Winston Churchill: to add to the well-painted canvas of life on the street: from working streets of Lambeth to the highest of politics.


Winspear has winning literary style that is at once thoughtful, stylish and subtly suspenseful. However, what I note most greatly attributing to her flair is her ability to keep page after page turning with convincing dialogue.  Her characters breathe to life: leaping off the page and into your sitting room, acting out as if they are staging the action affront you while you sit quietly, pensively with your tea attempting to outwit the unstoppable Maisie.

I recommend this series to those who have dappled in the world of Mildred Pierce and Lord Peter Wimsey.

Fans of Maisie and those uninitiated will enjoy the extras embedded in the Harper Perennial PS  edition: including an interview with best-selling novelist Lee Child who asks Winspear a myriad of questions about writing, how her personal life drips onto her pages and her passion for the after-math of WWI in England.

My thanks to TLC for the opportunity to review this book.