I was worried, as I picked up the second book in the Maisie Dobbs series, that it couldn't be as good as the first. The first book, Maisie Dobbs, travels through time to reveal its main character's life history, which isn't quite incidental to the plot (but is, really, quite close). The second book would have to travel fresh territory: readers already know Maisie's secret history, after all, so the new charge set to author Jacqueline Winspear is to keep the story interesting while keeping it in the present.

A third of the way through the new book, I was a little disappointed. The mystery in Birds of a Feather surrounds a run-away daughter -- a thirty-something runaway, that is, and an overbearing father who wants her "returned." The mystery itself grows in danger as the book progresses and the daughter's oldest friends are found dead, one by one, but the story isn't nearly as gripping as the mystery of the first book because the characters involved aren't nearly so sympathetic -- until, about halfway through, two things happen. First, Winspear ups the drama in the book significantly by introducing a second love interest for Maisie, a drug problem for her closest associate, and a bit of deus-ex-machina difficulty with and for her father; second, she starts making the dead women sympathetic. This was enough to pull me through the rest of the book, and I was rewarded for this by an unexpected but interesting ending that revealed further complexity in both father-daughter pairs.

My biggest problem with this book was that Winspear's sleight-of-hand in concealing the answer from the reader was far too obvious. Several times, Maisie finds "something" at a crime scene -- but what "something" is or means is not revealed to the reader, lest she be smarter than our heroine and therefore able to figure out the ending. It's at least 100 pages between the first mention of finding "something" and the revelation in words of what that "something" is, and it's not terribly revealing, even then -- which makes me believe that Winspear could have better served her audience by showing precisely what the character found and then dismissing it as insignificant. (This is only slightly more suave than the leave-it-out-entirely-until-the-reveal tricks that Agatha Christie used to play).

Instead, there are two mysteries here: the one Maisie Dobbs is investigating and the separate mystery of what she's found. It's mildly frustrating and a little insulting, and if the rest of the writing didn't show real sparks of creativity and character development, it might be enough to scare a worried reader away.