2 Legendary Detectives Take Their Final Cases

This summer, we bid farewell to two long-running mystery series heroines who are making their marks in wartime. We’ll start with Maisie Dobbs, the plucky and resourceful British investigator and psychologist whom Jacqueline Winspear introduced in 2003, who takes her 18th and final bow in THE COMFORT OF GHOSTS (Soho Crime, 342 pp., $29.95).

It’s fall 1945, just after the end of World War II. Maisie has been asked to investigate the four orphaned teens who are squatting in the vacant, once-grand London mansion where she worked as a maid years ago. There, she inadvertently stumbles onto a decades-old mystery involving her first husband, who died while test-piloting an airplane.

Maisie’s life will be forever changed by what she discovers: “Truth had at last come to the surface, had eased itself from the boundaries of the past as if it were a splinter rising up through skin.” Winspear gives Maisie the grace to face her pain, and wraps up the series with a deft touch.

Like many readers, I will dearly miss the voice of Maisie Dobbs.

After 11 books, Susan Elia MacNeal says adieu to Maggie Hope — once Winston Churchill’s secretary and now a capable and shrewd spy — in THE LAST HOPE (Bantam, 292 pp., $29). Maggie has blossomed professionally and personally over the course of the series. But in 1944, a marriage proposal from a longtime love, John Sterling, raises the stakes — as does her latest assignment: She has been ordered to assassinate the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is part of Germany’s nuclear weapons program.