Maisie Moves Forward, But Keeps Looking Back 
 I read the first three novels in the 
 Maisie Dobbs 
 series, and one of the later ones, but then stopped, largely because of the author's habit of taking two steps backward for three forward. The Cinderella story of the housemaid who gets sent by her titled employers to Cambridge, puts that on hold to volunteer as a nurse in WW1, and subsequently becomes a self-styled "psychologist and private detective," had a certain charm, but a substantial portion of each subsequent novel was spent in rehashing the story so far. Besides which, I got tired of Winspear's attempts to wring further variations on the legacy of the Great War, even a decade later. But the books do provide a certain nostalgia for a vanished age--and besides, I am a sucker for those covers. So when I heard the latest one would show Maisie in Gibraltar in 1937, I thought that maybe she had moved forward at last, and was eager to see her viewpoint on an entirely different place and period. 
 Maisie, it appears, has been away from England for some years, and is on her way home from India when she decides to break her journey in Gibraltar. Near the beginning of the book, there are a series of letters explaining this hiatus in her life. I don't know how much is new to close followers of the series, but at least the retrospective is quickly over. No sooner in Gibraltar, than Maisie stumbles on the body of a local photographer, a member of the Sephardic community, and decides to investigate. Meanwhile, various other people are keeping an eye on her, for various reasons, both political and personal. Across the border in Spain, of course, Civil War is raging, and the British colony is flooded with refugees who make convenient scapegoats for any unsolved crime, and equally convenient spies for their respective factions. The book has all the makings of a pleasant historical thriller. 
 Except that retrospection turns out to be more than the author's means of linking the novel to its predecessors; it is Maisie's principal modus operandi. Maisie goes around talking to people, it is true, but seemingly every chapter she pauses to go over her actions and conclusions in her mind. Though sound practice for a detective, her constant second-guessing of herself soon becomes tiresome in a novel, since everything gets told three times over. At several points, she imagines what someone from her earlier life might say to her--one of her former mentors, a girlfriend, or the Cockney barrow-boy she employed as her assistant--none of whom we actually meet in the book. One wonders what readers Winspear is serving: those new to the series would find this incomprehensible; old fans will know it already. Or perhaps it is the confirmation, the simple acknowledgement of shared experiences, that binds her faithful readers to her side? 
 Nonetheless, after about 200 pages, things get moving. Maisie grows tired of waiting in Gibraltar--the colony that one of the characters, working for the British Secret Service, calls the entrance hall to the Spanish Civil War--and crosses the frontier to see for herself. She even finds a brief use for her old skills as a battlefield nurse. I can't say that the greater clarity of action leads to a similar clarity in Maisie's investigation; the case of the murdered photographer remains frustratingly vague, as does the identity and fate of too many of the shady characters that cross Maisie's path in the course of the novel. 
 And I am not sure that I can trust anything she says about the Civil War either. Maisie sees a squadron of German and Italian bombers crossing the coast heading north--on their way, as she later realizes, to bomb Guernica. In fact, the Guernica bombers were stationed in north central Spain, but even as a stroke of poetic license, this makes no sense. To fly the entire length of the country, a distance of over 1,000 kilometers, coming from where? Does Winspear imagine her readers so ignorant of geography?