The Prisoner in the Castle
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**American-born spy and code-breaker extraordinaire Maggie Hope must solve a baffling series of murders among a group of captive agents on an isolated Scottish island, as the acclaimed World War II mystery series from *New York Times* bestselling author Susan Elia MacNeal continues.**
World War II is raging, and former spy Maggie Hope knows too much.
She knows what the British government is willing to do to keep its secrets.
She knows the real location of the planned invasion of France.
She knows who's lying. She knows who the double-crossers are. She knows exactly who is sending agents to their deaths.
These are the reasons Maggie is isolated on a remote Scottish island, in a prison known as Killoch Castle, out of contact with friends and family.
Then one of her fellow inmates drops dead in the middle of his after-dinner drink--and he's only the first. As victims fall one by one, Maggie will have to call upon all her wits and skills to escape--not just certain death...but certain murder.
For what's the most important thing Maggie Hope knows?
She must survive.
This description comes from the publisher. *The Prisoner in the Castle* is the eighth book in the Maggie Hope series, the first of which is *Mr. Churchill's Secretary*.
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Maggie is a brave, educated, strong young woman who I have come to love through the series. The ending of The Paris Spy was an unexpected cliffhanger and I was eagerly waiting for this installment, but unfortunately this was a disappointment.
Nothing really happens on the Island of Scarra where all these agents are isolated and imprisoned. They start getting killed off one by one but and I thought Maggie would get an opportunity to investigate and find the killer, but that's not what happened. Whatever she learned, she just stumbled upon by accident. I hoped atleast the story arc of the German Spy would be interesting, but it turned out to be quite anticlimactic. None of my favorite characters seemed to have much to do here.
I would still probably continue this series because Maggie is a wonderful character but this book was definitely forgettable.
Unlike a lot of other readers, I haven't read any previous Maggie Hope books and this is the eighth in the series, so I came with no knowledge of the character or the previous WWII adventures she'd had. That left me scrambling a bit as I tried to piece together Maggie's relationships with people back in London and how her backstory fit into this one. But that was a minor complaint and really, just left me hungry to read the previous novels.
I love locked-room mysteries (in this case a remote castle on the western slopes of Scotland) so that added to my enjoyment as I tried to figure out who among the eleven British SOE agents sequestered there (because of what they knew) was murdering the others one by one. (and yes, it's similar to Christie's And Then There Were None in that respect). I did find myself questioning early on the premise that the British government would actually imprison valuable agents in the middle of a crucial war, only to find in an author note at the end that yes, this type of facility actually did exist.
The plotting was spot-on, although in the early stages, I had a bit of trouble keeping all the various characters straight. And the settings—both the horrendous weather that keeps help from arriving and provides serious obstacles to Maggie communicating to her possible helpmates, as well as the creepy Scottish castle with its turrets, taxidermy heads, and hidden passages—lent an added layer to the mysterious goings-on. The most enjoyable part of the book was trying to figure out the “who” but the backstory of the previous residents of the castle lent an interesting air of foreboding to the remote setting.
I would definitely read earlier books in the series as Maggie Hope seems to be a resourceful, intelligent, and empathetic character, who reminded me of Maisie Dobbs, one of my favorite heroines. Plus I'm a sucker for WWII stories of female bravery and ingenuity.
