Pardonable lies

Sir Cecil Lawton comes to Maisie Dobbs, a psychologist and investigator in London, with a request from his dying wife. Agnes Lawton never accepted that their son Ralph, an aviator, was killed in the Great War. Her refusal drove her to the edge of madness and to people who practise the dark arts and claim to speak with the spirit world.

Maisie takes the case, and it tests her on several fronts. Her spiritual strength is strained, and so is her regard for her mentor, Maurice Blanche. The search for the truth about a pilot's death also sends her back to the place that holds her most painful memories of the war.

Her old college friend Priscilla Evernden returns to the story. Priscilla served in France and lost three brothers in the war, and one of them, it emerges, had a curious link to the missing Ralph Lawton.

This is the third novel in the Maisie Dobbs series, a historical mystery set in the aftermath of the First World War. The puzzle is a missing man, and the pull of the book is grief: a mother who cannot let her son go, and an investigator forced to face her own past. The danger Maisie meets along the way is described as grave.