I'm giving three stars instead of four for this book, which had some of the best and worst moments of the series so far. The mystery involves a painter, Nick Bassington-Hope, who falls from a scaffolding on the eve of unveiling his newest work at a gallery. Nick's twin sister, Georgiana, engages Maisie Dobbs to investigate whether his death was really an accident, as the police claim, or murder, which she suspects.

The piece of art itself hasn't been seen by any of Nick's closest friends or family, which makes the mystery a double search: for the truth of Nick's death and for the content of the painting. In investigating this, Maisie must wander through a somewhat foreign side of London: the fun side. While there's a lot of interesting mystery and detection, the most engaging part of the story has to do with the expanding social education of Maisie Dobbs. She goes dancing (on duty), she tries to enjoy her new flat, she --spoilers!!-- breaks up with Andrew Dene in order to be more independent. She's also broken free from her old mentor (after a fight in the third book). She barely mentions Captain Lynch. She even wears fashionable trousers! Somehow, though, in this book Maisie seems to have less fun than ever. Her decision to break up with Dene is quick and, for someone who's supposed to think so clearly about everything, muddled in its reasons and motivations. Her investigations are interesting, but she never seems fully interested in them. Instead, the book bounces from point to point, place to place, without ever comfortably inhabiting one strand with the full power of Maisie's supposedly legendary intelligence.

Throughout the book, there's nice attention to the struggle Maisie feels in her societal position. She's not of the same class she was when she was born, but she's not of the carefree upper class that she serves and socializes with, either. She's caught in between, constantly wanting to move ahead but feeling bad for those she leaves behind. There's actually several well-done moments that reveal this throughout, including her too-late intervention when her assistant's child falls ill. Though as a reader I wanted to see Maisie do more for Billy and his family, the reality of the times and situation prevented her. That was actually nice, if difficult, to read.

The problem is that her internal struggles come at the price of losing some attention to the external struggles of her investigation. Though Maisie may not be that interested at all times in what's going on with the Bassington-Hope case, it's imperative that the reader should be -- so the twists and turns, red herrings and blind alleys, that the author insists on exploring feel very much like not only Maisie going through the motions but also the writer. I wanted to care more about the entire mystery, but the players at the center of it were obscured for nearly the whole story -- making the final, emotional climax not very emotional at all. Like Maisie, we must lie in wait for the "villain" of the story to confess his crimes out loud in order to understand. A better story might have led us to understanding what he'd done without ever having made him give the Bond-villain speech at the end.

Overall, it was fine, but not richly written like the first volume. The fifth book promises a change from the norm, and I do look forward to picking it up soon.