To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


After reading this, knowing I missed a few I went back to look. Shockingly I had only missed 2 but I also see I was starting to tire of the series and I had hated book 11. It wasn't too hard to pick back up but I had a lot of the same issues with this as I did with books 8-11. It's becoming less and less about the mystery and more about Maisie's personal drama.

In fact, a lot of time the mystery was forgotten in lieu of dealing with the beginnings of WWII. Naturally given the time period this is set in and that both Maisie and Billy were in WWI, I expected this to eventually come in. And it takes over this story to the point I felt like Winspear really wanted to write about what was happening in Britain during the beginning of the war (This begins with the fall of Paris and Dunkirk) but didn't want to do the heavy lifting of creating all new characters and make us invest in them when she had ready made characters we already know.

So the mystery, one of Maisie's friends wants her to find his son, Joe who had disappeared. He was a young man, apprentice painter whose boss's company was tapped by the military to paint air force bases with fire retardant paint in case they're bombed. He had headaches and personality changes before he disappeared.

But the real story is Billy's son at Dunkirk and his younger son wanting to become a RAF plane mechanic and Priscilla's boy also in France and her underaged son running off with his wealthy friend in his friend's father's sailboat to help evacuate people from Dunkirk. Will they live? Are they going to come home? Will they be wounded.

The other big part of the story was Anna, the orphan girl Maisie is taking care of (or I should say parents are) who now has measles and there is the whole threat of Maisie having to give her up because widows can't have orphaned kids.


The mystery felt like an afterthought and ultimately unsatisfying.

CW - war wounds, suicide,



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