Book #61: Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the LAST book in the Maisie Dobbs series! And by last, I mean the last one she's published--it was published this year, so there very well could be many more to come, which I wouldn't mind at all! I've really enjoyed getting into this series and reading all nine of these mysteries. Winspear definitely does a good job of creating a good mystery AND interweaving it with real-life concerns and experiences that Maisie has. That's something that seems lacking in a lot of other mystery novels, like Sherlock Holmes--you'd never know he thinks about anything other than the case he's working on. But Maisie is a real human being with her own problems that she has to deal with at the same time that she works on these mysteries.

I kind of felt like the actual case Maisie was working on in this novel fell flat--the resolution didn't seem like an actual resolution to me and didn't seem to really solve the questions she'd start off with. But I was so thrilled that Maisie finally began to confront her most annoying characteristic, that has shown up in ALL of the previous novels--she always tries to do everything for everyone else, to the point of being overbearing and meddlesome. She bought a house for her assistant, Billy, because she really and truly wanted to help them, but, I mean, nobody asked her to do that. They never asked her for help--she just went and did it and basically forced them to move in there, in a very kind and helpful way. All of that stuff comes back to bite her in this book, and she begins to realize what she's doing and trying to stop that habit. Thank goodness! And her relationship with James hits a few snags, but luckily they figure things out in a better way than I'd expected. I wish she'd just get over her "I'm too independent; I can't get married" thing, but I understood why she felt that way much more in this book than ever before.