Maisie Dobbs travels to Kent to investigate, among other things, a series of fires, a family of Dutch bakers who were killed during WWI in a zeppelin attack and the theft of some silver. Hop-picking has brought everyone to the area, from Londoners to Gypsies. Orlagh Cassidy, who also read Messenger of Truth, not only captures a range of London and Kentish accents, but she also individualizes even the most minor characters. The lilt of a Danish luthier is perfect, and the dozen or so villagers interviewed by Dobbs have their own rhythms of speech and tone. Cassidy's rendition of Roma words comes across as authentic. This engrossing mystery will be hard to put down, and the listener will be sad when the final, lively strains of a fiddle are heard. Simultaneous release with the Holt hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 26). (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
An Incomplete Revenge (Maisie Dobbs Series #5)
Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy
Jacqueline WinspearUnabridged — 9 hours, 18 minutes
An Incomplete Revenge (Maisie Dobbs Series #5)
Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy
Jacqueline WinspearUnabridged — 9 hours, 18 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
In the midst of the hop-picking season in the village of Heronsdene, Kent, Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator, undertakes an assignment from James Compton, son of her long-time supporter, Lady Rowan Compton, to look into aspects of a land purchase on his behalf.
Quickly drawn into the local community, with its prejudices against the seasonal workers from London and the traveling gypsies who flock to Kent at harvest-time, Maisie soon becomes involved in an effort to discover the source of petty crime in the area, as well as a spate of fires that has blighted Heronsdene for years.
As she is pulled deeper into the investigation, Maisie is increasingly intrigued by the peculiar mood of melancholy and secrecy that shrouds the village, a feeling that is inflamed by the villagers' fear — but just what has caused them to be so afraid? The beloved sleuth must draw on all her training and experience to discover the truth in this gripping, atmospheric installment of the best-selling series.
A Macmillan Audio production.
A Macmillan Audio production.
Editorial Reviews
Revenge is a dish served incompletely in Winspear's fifth Maisie Dobbs novel (after Messenger of Truth). This time, Maisie is employed by James Compton to investigate a number of strange fires that break out in a Kent village around harvest time each year when the community is bustling with locals, Londoners, and Gypsies. Compton's company is interested in buying the local brickwork manufacturer, but he wants to make certain the purchase won't cause any ill effects to his company. Maisie soon senses that the villagers know more than they will say about the mysterious fires. They also won't talk about the Martin family killed in a zeppelin air raid during the Great War. Will Maisie discover the truth before revenge and guilt destroy the village? Winspear paints a historical cozy featuring intriguing characters and surprising twists. Maisie is absolutely compelling not only as an investigator but also as a psychologist while she probes the hearts and minds of those she meets. Highly recommended for all mystery and popular fiction collections.
Maisie Dobbs is a revelation.” —Alexander McCall Smith, Author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
“Those unfamiliar with the Maisie Dobbs series are best advised to start here and work their way backward. . . . An Incomplete Revenge shows Maisie at the top of her detecting form.” —Newsday
“A smart, pragmatic private investigator and psychologist with extraordinary empathic sensitivity . . . Every page of this novel is dense with affectionately rendered period detail. Winspear deftly intertwines multiple story lines. The tale becomes increasingly gripping as the novel progresses toward a truly moving ending.” —The Boston Globe
“Winspear's lively and graceful prose, strong sense of time and place, and her ability to create believable and sympathetic characters make the book a joy to read.” —The Denver Post
“A pleasure . . . This nuanced series explores England in the aftermath of World War I, when millions of women who lost their husbands, lovers, and sons were left to make their own ways. Maisie is one of that group, and her way is an appealing one.” —The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“A compelling and intriguing puzzle . . . Winspear infuses this moving novel with wisdom, restrained emotion and, as is her custom, issues of morality.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Intriguing . . . Fascinating . . . Skillfully drawn.” —The Washington Times
“One of the more robust entries in the historical mystery category.” —The Seattle Times
“Often eloquent and deeply human.” —The Providence Journal
Jacqueline Winspear adds a fascinating episode to the Maisie Dobbs series, which justly gains fans with each new story. Orlagh Cassidy began the audio series with PARDONABLE LIES and continues her appealing portraits of the characters. She smoothly, and quite elegantly, delivers a variety of accents of the Kent countryside gentry and townsfolk, as well as the Londoners of different classes. The festive spirit of the “hop-picking season” covers some dark secrets in a rural village, as the legacy of loss in WW I haunts many who survived those years. Cassidy nicely conveys Maisie’s honest wisdom, sensible approach to her “inquiries,” and spirited manners. The details of village life, a community of Gypsies, and the shifts in attitudes of the late 1920s make a vivid audio mystery. R.F.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169368628 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Macmillan Audio |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2008 |
| Series: | Maisie Dobbs Series |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 679,632 |
Read an Excerpt
An Incomplete Revenge
A Maisie Dobbs Novel
By Winspear, Jacqueline Henry Holt and Co.
Copyright © 2008
Winspear, Jacqueline
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780805082159
PROLOGUE
Early September 1931
The old woman rested on the steps of her home, a caravan set apart from those of the rest of her family, her tribe. She pulled a clay pipe from her pocket, inspected the dregs of tobacco in the small barrel, shrugged, and struck a match against the rim of a water butt tied to the side of her traveling home. She lit the pipe with ease, clamping her ridged lips around the end of the long stem to draw vigor from the almost-spent contents. A lurcher lay at the foot of the steps, seeming at first to be asleep, though the old woman knew that one ear was cocked to the wind, one eye open and watching her every move.
Aunt Beulah Webb—that was the name she was known by, for an older gypsy woman was always known as aunt to those younger—sucked on her pipe and squinted as she surveyed the nearby fields, then cast her eyes to the hop-gardens beyond. The hops would be hanging heavy on the bine by now, rows upon rows of dark-green, spice-aroma’d swags, waiting to be harvested, picked by the nimble hands of men, women and children alike, most of whom came from London for a working late-summer holiday. Others were gypsies like herself, and the rest were gorja from the surrounding villages. Gorja. More house dwellers, more who were not gypsies.
Her people kept themselves to themselves, went about their business without invitingtrouble. Aunt Beulah hoped the diddakoi families kept away from the farm this year. A Roma would trust anyone before a diddakoi—before the half-bred people who were born of gypsy and gorja. As far as she was concerned, they looked for trouble, expected it. They were forgetting the old ways, and there were those among them who left the dregs of their life behind them when they moved on, their caravans towed by boneshaker lorries, not horses. The woman looked across at the caravan of the one she herself simply called Webb. Her son. Of course, her son’s baby daughter, Boosul, was a diddakoi, by rights, though with her shock of ebony hair and pebble-black eyes, she favored Roma through and through.
About her business in the morning, Beulah brought four tin bowls from underneath the caravan—underneath the vardo in the gypsy tongue. One bowl was used to wash tools used in the business of eating, one for the laundering of clothes, one for water that touched her body, and another for the cleaning of her vardo. It was only when she had completed those tasks, fetching dead wood from the forest for the fire to heat the water, that she finally placed an enamel kettle among the glowing embers and waited for it to boil for tea. Uneasy unless working, Beulah bound bunches of Michaelmas daisies to sell door to door, then set them in a basket and climbed back into her vardo.
She knew the village gorja, those out about their errands, would turn their backs when they saw her on the street, would glance away from her black eyes and dark skin now rippled with age. They would look aside so as not to stare at her gold hoop earrings, the scarf around her head, and the wide gathered skirt of threadbare deep-purple wool that marked her as a gypsy. Sometimes children would taunt.
“Where are you going, pikey? Can’t you hear, you old gyppo woman?’
But she would only have to stare, perhaps point a charcoal blackened finger, and utter words in dialect that came from deep in the throat, a low grumble of language that could strike fear into the bravest bully—and they would be gone.
Women were the first to turn away, though there were always a few—enough to make it worth her while—who would come to the door at her knock, press a penny into her outstretched hand, and take a bunch of the daisies with speed lest their fingers touch her skin. Beulah smiled. She would see them again soon enough. When dusk fell, a twig would snap underfoot as a visitor approached her vardo with care. The lurcher would look up, a bottomless growl rumbling in her gullet. Beulah would reach down and place her hand on the dog’s head, whispering, “Shhhh, jook.” She would wait until the steps were closer, until she could hold the lurcher no longer, and then would call out, “Who’s there?” And, after a second or two, a voice, perhaps timid, would reply, “I’ve come for my fortune.”
Beulah would smile as she uncovered the glass sphere she’d brought out and set on the table at eventide, waiting.
Not that a ball made of a bit of glass had anything to do with it, yet that was what was expected. The gypsy might not have been an educated woman, but she knew what sold. She didn’t need glass, or crystal, a bit of amethyst, a cup of still-wet tea leaves, or a rabbit’s foot to see, either. No, those knickknacks were for the customers, for those who needed to witness her using something solid, because the thought of her seeing pictures of what was to come in thin air would be enough to send them running. And you never scared away money.
Beulah heard a squeal from the tent that leaned against her son’s vardo, little Boosul waking from sleep. Her people were stirring, coming out to light fires, to make ready for the day. True gypsies never slept in their spotless vardos, with shining brass and wafer-thin china hanging from the walls. Like Beulah, they lived in tents, hardy canvas tied across a frame of birch or ash. The vardos were kept for best. Beulah looked up to the rising sun, then again at the fields as the steamy mist of warming dew rose to greet the day. She didn’t care for the people of this village, Heronsdene. She saw the dark shadow that enveloped each man and woman and trailed along, weighing them down as they went about their daily round. There were ghosts in this village—ghosts who would allow the neighbors no rest.
As she reached down to pour scalding water into the teapot, the old woman’s face concertina’d as a throbbing pain and bright light bore down upon her with no warning, a sensation with which she was well familiar. She dropped the kettle back into the embers and pressed her bony knuckles hard against her skull, squeezing her eyes shut against flames that licked up behind her closed eyelids. Fire. Again. She fought for breath, the heat rising up around
her feet to her waist, making her old legs sweat, her hands clammy. And once more she came to Beulah, walking out from the very heart of the inferno, the younger woman she had not yet met but knew would soon come. It would not be long now; the time approached—of that she was sure. The woman was tall and well dressed, with black hair—not long hair, but not as short as she’d seen on some of the gorja womenfolk in recent years. Beulah leaned against the vardo, the lurcher coming to stand at her mistress’s side as if to offer her lean body as buttress. This woman, who walked amid the flames of Beulah’s imagination, had known sadness, had lived with death. And though she now stepped forward alone, the grief was lifting—Beulah could see it ascending like the morning cloud, rising up to leave her in peace. She was strong, this woman of her dreams, and . . . Beulah shook her head. The vision was fading; the woman had turned away from her, back into the flames, and was gone.
The gypsy matriarch held one hand against her forehead, still leaning against her vardo. She opened her eyes with care and looked about her. Only seconds had passed, yet she had seen enough to know that a time of great trouble was almost upon her. She believed the woman—the woman for whom she waited—would be her ally, though she could not be sure. She was sure of three things, though—that the end of her days drew ever closer, that before she breathed her last, a woman she had never seen in her life would come to her, and that this woman, even though she might think of herself as ordinary, of little account in the wider world, still followed Death as he made his rounds. That was her calling, her work, what she was descended of gorja and gypsy to do. And Beulah Webb knew that here, in this place called Heronsdene, Death would walk among them soon enough, and there was nothing she could do to prevent such fate. She could only do her best to protect her people.
The sun was higher in the sky now. The gypsy folk would bide their time for three more days, then move to a clearing at the edge of the farm, setting their vardos and pitching their tents away from Londoners, who came for the picking to live in whitewashed hopper huts and sing their bawdy songs around the fire at night. And though she would go about her business, Beulah would be waiting—waiting for the woman with her modern clothes and her tidy hair. Waiting for the woman whose sight, she knew, was as powerful as her own.
Continues...
Excerpted from An Incomplete Revenge by Winspear, Jacqueline Copyright © 2008 by Winspear, Jacqueline. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Videos
