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Crazy for Maisie
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Jacqueline Winspear Audio Renaissance, $39.95 11 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 1593978146
Paddy (Patricia) Meehan, who makes her debut in Denise Mina's Field of Blood, is unlike Maisie Dobbs in everything except her smarts and appeal. Self-consciously overweight, scrappy, from a tight-knit, Catholic working-class family in gritty 1980s Glasgow, Paddy works as a "copy boy" for the Scottish Daily News, trying to forge a career as an investigative journalist amid a bunch of hard-drinking, foul-mouthed male chauvinists. When a small boy is brutally murdered and two 11-year-olds are accused of the crime, Paddy discovers that one of them is her fiancé's cousin. Setting out to investigate the case on her own, she finds herself in a morass of moral dilemmas and mortal danger. Mina's writing, her sense of place and social fabric and her keenly delineated characters surpass genre designation. This is more than crime fiction, and Heather O'Neill's intelligent performance with its authentic Scot's burr is a perfect match for it.
By Denise Mina Highgate, $29.95 7.75 hours abridged, CD ISBN 1565119649
You may be freaked out by listening to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's fascinating bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, but if you follow Levitt's carefully constructed, mind-stretching correlations, you will ultimately discover that you've been freaked in. If Levitt is a rogue, let's hope that "rogue" thinking and "rogue" analysis become mainstream. Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Dubner take the rigorous methods of economics and statistics and apply them to "the riddles of everyday life," such as—why has the crime rate dropped nationwide? What's more dangerous: a swimming pool or a gun? How much do parents really matter? Though answers to questions like these may offend both sides of the political spectrum, they make you think—and that never offends.
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner HarperAudio, $29.95 7 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0060776137
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With Pardonable Lies, Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, the compelling, clever star of her increasingly popular, eponymous mystery series, makes her audio debut, though she has appeared in two previous books. I was delighted to meet Maisie, "psychologist and investigator," and delighted with Orlagh Cassidy's performance; she moves easily from Maisie's honeyed English to accents and inflections that perfectly suit the others in the story. It's 1930, but Maisie and all of Britain are still feeling the devastating effects of WWI. Now, the three cases she's taken on draw her back to France where, as a very young nurse, she'd been exposed to the horrors of war firsthand. Winspear evokes that postwar world with great skill, gives her characters depth and back stories that ring true and uses the mysteries themselves to reveal much of the fascinating ethos of the time. I know we'll hear more from Maisie.
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