“Among the Mad” - Jacqueline Winspear
💣 Maisie is urgently called in to second the Scotland Yard Special Crimes unit as a killer who has already made good on deadly threats, is demanding governmental action on behalf of veterans without which the killer threatens much greater loss of innocent life.
She ends up in the middle of a turf battle between Scotland Yard and the military. If she was angry with Maurice for withholding information in prior books, I’d have thought our straight arrow Maisie would be livid this time with the lack of transparency between government entities sharing the objective of apprehending a dangerous and desperate man.
💣 Parts of the story are narrated from the POV of the troubled mind behind the deaths and threats. It’s excellent use of the unreliable narrator plot device. We never quite know whether to take the writings at their face value or not.
💣 Winspear provides a great deal of researched detail in ATM about the state of the art of mental hospitals, neurology, and psychiatric medicine post-WWI. Again, she’s taking a hard look at the treatment of shell shock and war neurosis, and the pressures on doctors (during and after the war) to declare a man fit for duty. She makes a point that physical wounds would entitle a soldier to small pension, whereas a mental wound entitled them to nothing. In the post-war period, there is also a pressure to discharge soldiers with lingering mental health conditions into what? A tanking global economy with no support to reintegrate meaningfully into society.
💣 I noticed a greater deal of physicality in Maisie, which was a departure from her usual cerebral approach to crime solving.
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