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Michael Clifton, a young cartographer, dreams of the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley in California. It’s where he plans to settle once his service in the British Army is up. But he disappears before he can return home. In 1932—seventeen years later—his remains are found in France.
Michael’s parents retain Maisie Dobbs to find an unnamed nurse who corresponded with Michael during the war. Her love letters are found among his things, and they could hold a clue as to where and who she might be.
Maisie discovers that Michael was murdered in his trench—and that someone else wants to find the unknown nurse before Maisie can reach her. Violence erupts, putting both of Michael’s parents in the hospital in serious condition. Then Maisie is attacked and her briefcase stolen. Someone dangerous is growing desperate, and if Maisie can’t stop him, another person might turn up dead, leaving Michael’s death a mystery forever.
As she searches for the nurse and a murderer, Maisie faces the approaching death of her mentor, Maurice Blanche, memories of her own wartime romance, and the possibility of a new love in her life.
Though The Mapping of Love and Death is unhurried and rather methodical, it will still capture your attention as you try to work along with Maisie to unravel the clues and solve a seventeen-year-old murder. The story will take you to the outer edges of the world, following the men who mapped the way for soldiers going into battle. If not for the cartographers’ meticulous attention to detail, soldiers would be going in blind.
In addition to the mystery, you also get a tragic love story between a nurse and a soldier, which doesn’t lead you quite where you think it might. But the murder mystery stays front and center as Maisie Dobbs follows the evidence into places she’d rather not go—places that are sometimes within her mind.
The Mapping of Love and Death will keep you gripped while easing you through a mystery that will make you stop and think. If you need an interesting story that moves at a slower pace to help you catch your breath after all of those super-fast thrillers (like I sometimes do), I highly recommend picking up this Maisie Dobbs mystery.
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