To Die but Once audiobook

I really liked the mysteries in this one but from near the start it was a sad situation.I loved all the settings and that the book’s storyline took place at such an interesting time. I liked that the reader sees how ordinary English people handled various situations. I love Anna, and I hope everything will go as well as possible with the situation with her and Maisie. Two great dogs and a horse in this one. I’ve cried only a very few times when I’ve read the books in this series but I cried a bit while reading this book.As usual, there are interesting and informative author’s notes at the end. I appreciated how the author has family/personal connections & experiences with so many aspects of this particular story including Dunkirk, toxic fire retardant paint and many other WWII specific event & situations.Some of many quotes that I liked:“And I know only too well how time can cast a sort of skin over an event—a membrane that gets thicker until a point where broaching the subject is all but impossible, even when you think you can face the grief and terror once more.”“Tragedy is so personal, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before, to someone, somewhere—it’s what helps us to understand and bring solace to others, knowing something of what they feel.”“about putting on the light in a dark room. He told me that when we keep secrets they grow inside us, and we can’t see the truth of them anymore.”4-1/2 stars rounded up vs. down because I particularly liked this book #14.

After I started this, I realized that I skipped the 13th book! How I missed that one last year is beyond me! I still love this series and I’m liking the way WWII is being introduced. Looking forward to more from Maisie Dobbs.

Fourteenth in the Maisie Dobbs, private investigator–historical mystery series now at the start of World War II in England and revolving around Maisie and the people who surround her.My TakeI can't help but love Maisie Dobbs. Every time I read her story, I'm so impressed with her rise from her poor beginnings, simply because she wanted to learn and of her compassion for others. Yes, yes, I know this is fiction, but fiction can motivate us into believing a dream, and that's not a bad thing.As Maisie remembers an old aphorism: "Where there's muck, there's brass", a comment about how war enriches the coffers of some and pushes others to ignore safety issues. The horror that kills so many, so needlessly. There's also a somewhat brighter side, of men, women, boys, who are willing to step up and help. Winspear pulls in the evacuation of Dunkirk, although I think she could have, should have?, created more tension for that aspect of the story.There's also the pride and fear of those left behind, especially when the last war is still so close in their memories. Maisie does pull from the personal for what tension there is about Dunkirk in particular, what with Priscilla's and Billy's horrible experiences during World War I, as they worry about loved ones caught up in the evacuation. Other side themes include Maisie's worries about Anna and how accepted she is in both households; the benevolent spy is quite minor; and, those emotional effects of war and how it increases everyone's concerns for and thoughts of family.It's that prologue that starts the main theme, and it hung with me, every word. A beautiful description of a worried lad who won't be coming home, and the only time we're not hearing from Maisie's third person simple subjective point-of-view. Maisie also pushes lots of good advice about acceptance and acknowledgement of the dreams of others. She does seem to be more accepting of James' choices in life.I know it's not only wartime when parents become worried about their children, but it does increase the worries, and Winspear has quite a few examples of those worries, which make quite a bit of sense — on the sides of both parent and child. It's a child's maturation and their need for independence that is multiplied when it comes to war. Of wanting to be seen as a man equal to others.Winspear is smooth and keeps the tension low, but it's there. Oh, yeah. It's there. I'm wondering if she has had training as a psychologist, as she's so great at describing feelings and using a person's posture to measure their concerns. Wait'll you read her description of Mrs. Digby. Almost made me want to get outside and breathe in some clear air!There was an interesting bit about currency and the effects wartime has on it. That point about money under the bed certainly made me sit up. Winspear also explains why Britain had to ration everything during the war. I'm sure I've heard the reasons before, but for some reason, Winspear's explanation struck me. And it makes such sense. *Laughing*, I finally learn why the Flying Squad was nicknamed the Sweeney Todd, *more laughing*.It's a different perspective on the war, and its effect on the English. I do look forward to the next Maisie Dobbs to see how that changes. For this is another reason I love this series, Winspear stays so true to the times, the clothing, the mores and customs, the everyday life, and the leading technology of the day — those fridges that are a new introduction to the English lifestyle. It makes me appreciate what we have today and marvel at the possibilities of tomorrow. Throughout there are references to apprentices, when children are considered old enough to work, being a man at 16. It's quite the reverse of how we see today's middle teens. And it seems that Maisie is getting on a bit, not noticing those little things that Billy and Sands are noticing.And dang it. What is it with foreshadowing that you never know until afterwards!The StoryWhen a neighbor's son goes missing, especially after his complaints, his father asks Maisie to look in on him. Make sure he's okay.It becomes an investigation that goes so much deeper, uncovering fraud, shady plots, murder, spies.And Maisie is worried what the Ministry of Health inspector will think of Maisie's application.The CharactersMaisie Dobbs trained as a psychologist and investigator under Dr Maurice Blanche. Since then, she married James Compton, Viscount Compton, and became widowed. She continues to run her investigative agency and consults with Scotland Yard, Special Branch, and MI5. Brenda was the former housekeeper who married Frankie Dobbs, Maisie's father. And he disapproves of Maisie's growing attachment to Anna.Lord Julian and Lady Rowena Compton are Maisie's in-laws. Lord Julian has lots of connections in government and on the boards of a number of business, including banking. He'll be elected leader of the Local Defense Volunteers unit, later known as the Home Guard. Simmonds is the butler. They have Canadian officers billeted in their house.Anna is the little girl, a sensitive, from In This Grave Hour , 13, who was evacuated to the Dower House, Maisie's home in the country and on the Compton estate, Chelstone Manor, near Tunbridge Wells. Dr Stringer is caring for Anna who's come down with the measles. Emma, a giant Alastian, is attached to Anna while Jook, as much as he loves Frankie, spends a lot of time with Anna. Lady is Anna's white pony. Supposedly, Marco, a seaman from Malta, is Anna's father.Billy Beale has suffered his share of problems as a veteran of WWI and volunteers as an ARP man for this war. He's been Maisie's assistant for some years now. His oldest son, Billy, is with the British Expeditionary Forces at Dunkirk. Sixteen-year-old Bobby, their second son, is an apprentice mechanic with his own ideas. Mrs. Relf is a London neighbor. Arthur Beale is Billy's cousin who never came home from World War I. Sandra is Maisie's part-time secretary. She's married to Lawrence Pickering, a publisher at Pickering Publishing Company, and they have a baby son, Martin.Priscilla Partridge is a close friend from their university days who soaks her depression in alcohol; she's married to Douglas Partridge, a writer who works with the wartime Ministry of Information. Timothy, the oldest, has enlisted in the RAF. Tom can't wait to enlist. Tarquin is the youngest. Elinor is/was the boys' nanny, so beloved that the family insists she stay on, as family. She's joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but Maisie is doubting it.Gordon Sanderson is Tom's friend whose dad has a small fleet, including the Cassandra , at Rye. Bea Sanderson is his mother. Mick Tate is a fisherman in Rye. Mistress Molly is the saving of the Cassandra.Phil and Sally Coombes run the Prince of Wales pub, one of Maisie's neighbors of her business office. Archie is their oldest at twenty-one; he's living on his own and is a foreman and fitter for an engineering works with too much money to account for. Vivian is the middle child who works at the telephone exchange. Their youngest, fifteen-year-old Joe, is lucky to have this painting job, as it's a reserved occupation.Scotland Yard, Special Branch, etc.Detective Chief Inspector Caldwell is with Scotland Yard and has come to respect Maisie. Caldwell's assistant, Francis Able, enlisted as Able Seaman Able; Able's dad is a desk sergeant in Essex. Detective Chief Inspector "Spud" Murphy in Basingstoke is no fool. Dr Clarissa Clark is the pathologist, who isn't a fool either. Nor especially humble, lol. Seems Dr Blanche was her favorite professor. Richard Stratton is back with Special Branch doing war work. Robert "Robbie" McFarlane is a liaison between Special Branch and the Secret Service; his eighteen-year-old nephew, Sandy, is at Dunkirk. Stratton used to see Maisie. Constable Sheering is with the Rye PD. Harry Bream is with the Flying SquadDuff Cooper seems to be a colleague of Douglas'. He's coordinating the release of information about the evacuation of the BFE from the beach at Dunkirk.Yates and Sons are……a painting and decorating firm that got a lucrative government contract. Bill Yates is the father; Mike is the son who pushes (and gets) good contracts. Freddie Mayes is the foreman on Joe's painting team; Len is the bigger of the painters; and, Sidney Spooner is a driver with a previous as long as his arm. Charlotte Bright can't wait to leave her job working for that nasty Mike and join the ATS. Her father is a sergeant at the Carter Street police station.Jimmy Robertson is a criminal with his fingers in a lot of pies. Barney Coleman had been one of his "tea boys", Jimmy's cousin, and now holding up the Rotherhithe Docks. Doris and Sally are his sisters.Whitchurch, Hampshire, is……at the center of the action and where Doreen and Margaret Rose (Billy Beale's wife and daughter) are staying with Aunt Millicent in one of the tied cottages on Keep's farm. Mrs. Keep runs a B&B.The last place Joe lodged was……near Whitchurch. Mrs. Digby is the landlady who thinks quite a lot of herself…and that Sid Watkins with his eyes and hands. Leading Aircraftswoman Sylvia Preston, a WAAF, is one of the lodgers with a conscience, and it applies to her current job as a driver as well!Phineas "Finny" Hutchins owns Moorwood Farm over in Whitchurch and became very friendly with Joe. He raises sheepdogs, including Odin and Loki with Freya as the mum. Magni is the name Joe chose for his pup. Joseph Hutchins was the son who died at 19 in World War I.Airfields in HampshireCaptain Michaels is at Andover. Hurstbourne Tarrant is a decoy. Flight Lieutenant Cobb and Sergeant Packham are at the same airfield as Corporal Teddy Wickham, who is Archie's best friend, and whom the Coombes family has known forever.Dr Andrew Dene ( Pardonable Lies , 3) is now a renowned orthopedic surgeon at the hospital in Hastings and a professor of orthopedic medicine in London. Maisie once dated him, and now they're friends. He's married with children. Walter Miles is a new tenant at Maisie's office building. And he has the most marvelous green thumb. Well, he is a botanist and lectures over at Bedford College.Jack Barker is still selling papers outside Maisie's office. His grandson, Peter, is now in the army. Jim Turner owns Turner's Farm and has his evacuees slaving away on his farm. Peter Sands is Billy's painting and decorating friend who keeps Maisie and company supplied with wallpaper ends. Mr Roache runs the special ambulance driver practice that Maisie and Priscilla are supposed to be attending. Bernard Klein is Maisie's lawyer; Anthony is his clerk. Dr Elsbeth Masters is the psychiatrist Doreen has seen in the past.The Cover and TitleThe cover is the expected woodcut style (I do love it) with Maisie standing in the shadow of a plane's wing in a silhouetted profile, her back to us, and wearing a trim and neatly fitted suit and a cloche. She's holding some papers to her chest tightly as she watches a pilot clamber into his military plane on a grassy lawn. The background is a beautiful late spring sky with big billowing clouds rising up from the ground and another plane high in the sky. Text begins with an info blurb in yellow at the very top with the author's name below that in a deep orange and a much smaller title in yellow below that. The series information (thank you!) is black and centered in a cloud.I'm wondering if the title is about everyone, for war causes those involved, with family and friends endangered, to die in their hearts for every loss. What wouldn't they give To Die But Once.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this series. This is book fourteen in the Maisie Dobbs series. Maisie was a nurse in World War One; then trained to be a psychologist/investigator after the war. The story opens in May 1940. Great Britain is again at war with Germany. Maisie has been hired to investigate the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old boy, Joseph Combes. He is an apprentice painter working for a company that has a government contract to go about the countryside to paint a special fire-retardant chemical on strategic government and military buildings.The book is well written and researched. The author has the story set with a background of Dunkirk and the battle of Britain. This is a great historical novel. The plot twist and turns around family drama. I have read that Winspear bases a lot of the plot on her own family’s experiences. If you enjoy historical novels this book would provide you great enjoyment.I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is ten and a half hours. Orlagh Cassidy does a superb job narrating the book. Cassidy is one of my favorite narrators. Cassidy is an actress, voice over artist and award-winning audiobook narrator.

This series is one of my top 5 favorites. This one didn’t disappoint. It was an especially edgy read this time because both Billy’s and Priscilla’s sons are in jeopardy against the background of the battle of Dunkirk. And especially edgy because, as we know to our sorrow, Winspear does not hesitate to kill off anyone, even beloved characters if it furthers her story. But, boy, this one was terrific and the historic detail is fascinating. I’m starting to think, sadly, that people of this era were a lot tougher—and considerably more honorable—than they are now. Sorry, it’s the age of Trump, I guess, and my faith in people isn’t what it used to be.

These books are my guilty pleasure! Found this very interesting because it included a Dunkirk story.

In the spring of 1940, World War II had been underway in Europe for more than half a year, but the violence had yet to come home to England. Suddenly, on May 10, Hitler's legions rumbled across the borders of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and, finally, France. The 300,000-man British Expeditionary Force had been deployed on the Continent to support the French Army. Now, it found itself steadily pushed into a tighter and tighter space along the coast around the French port of Dunkerque (Dunkirk).In the Battle of Dunkirk, the English people finally came to confront the terror of modern war. During ten days in late May and early June, German armies savaged retreating English and French troops and Stuka dive-bombers pounded ships sent to evacuate them. When the Admiralty confessed its inability to save the troops, newly installed Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued an open call for all British seagoing vessels to join the effort. The result was "the Miracle of Dunkirk" depicted in the popular 2017 film, Dunkirk.On the home front, children have been evacuated from London to the countryside. In the "Phony War" that preceded the Nazi attack on the Low Countries, many families had begun to bring their children back to the city. Now, with British troops on the verge of annihilation on the Continent, a German invasion appears imminent, and that is changing. All the earmarks of home defense have sprung up: blackout curtains, barrage balloons, observation posts all along the coast, gasoline rationing, and "reserved professions" vital to feeding the people and, as the saying went, "keeping the home fires burning."This is the background against which Jacqueline Winspear's fourteenth Maisie Dobbs novel is set. To Die But Once begins just days before the Battle of Dunkirk. Maisie's practice as a "psychologist and investigator" has slowed, freeing her up to look into the disappearance of the teenage son of the couple who run the local pub. The young man had been sent to rural Hampshire as an apprentice to a painting crew working on a contract for the Royal Air Force. Maisie's investigation confronts her and Billy Beale, her assistant, with a notorious gangster, war profiteers, and a plan to rob the Bank of England. Winspear tells the tale with her customary deep understanding of human behavior and her respect for historical accuracy. As she reveals in the Acknowledgments, the book was inspired by her late father, a young apprentice in a painting crew during the war.

One of the best in the series and I've read them all, so far. It's spring, 1940. There's several stories running here; the mystery concerns the disappearance of Joe, the young painting apprentice? He's been working on a crew painting RAF buildings with a fire retardant that gives him headaches and seems to be causing a personality change. Then there's the WWII story . . . Maisie and friend Priscilla are training as rescue ambulance workers, there's rumors that the British Expeditionary Force is in trouble in France and then there's Dunkirk. Maisie has her young ward, Anna, safe in the country but we see the worries of those still in London and those who have left. I enjoyed the author's acknowledgments, too, where she gives credit to her dad for inspiring the story; he was a fourteen year apprentice doing his part as a government painter also, and to her extended family who were in all theaters of the war & shared stories. And her own WWI family story is always the background, too . . . of how the horror of war damages lives for decades after treaties are signed.

Jacqueline Winspear's books about England facing and recovering from its 20th century wars are always good, but this is one of the best. To Die but Once takes us to the early years after England's entry into World War II. British soldiers are fighting on the Continent. Hitler's forces are pinning them down. At home, a boy from Maisie Dobbs' neighborhood has gone to work for a defense contractor, painting military buildings with fire retardant. The boy is murdered. Maisie's investigation looks at the seamy side of defense contracting. It's based on things that actually happened in England in that period.Then comes the evacuation of Dunkirk. A boy who is like a nephew to Maisie runs off to participate.The book is full of action and compassion. Winspear's books educate us about England's suffering in war.