Hello, ReadersConnection

I'm with you!
I know that it took a good bit of struggle to get this Blog up and running, so I appreciate the effort you made, Kathy. I will try to contribute regularly--books I am reading, those I like and why; those I don't cotton to, and why.

Among the Mad (Jacqueline Windspear)
I read this yesterday while I was putting off something more pressing.
This is perhaps the fifth in the Maisie Dobbs series, recounting the adventures of a young woman detective in 1930s England. An independent detective working on her own in the early-depression years, driven by a considerable intellect and a deep social conscience: a fresh idea with almost limitless promise. Windspear's first Maise Dobbs book delivered--an engaging plot and an acute description of the horrors that the WW I had visited on England and her people, made Maisie Dobbs a family must-read.
I was disappointed in the second, and I quit after the third.
Then here I was yesterday, so in need of diversion that I took up Kathy's Christmas gift of the most recent effort, Among the Mad.
I won't make the same mistake again (how often have I said that?). Despite the author's heavy-handed signalling that she is about to develop Maisie Dodds as a character, it hasn't occured: a sort of '...and now she felt freer than in years...', with no substance to it.
The social themes that enlivened the first in the series--the horrible damage done to England by war and through the class sytem--are revisited, the characters-as-social-critics mouthing the same easy observations they have made from the beginning.
England between the wars was all that, and so much more--and this series should have been much more too.
And that's how I read it....Ken