Heather Shaw asked Jacqueline Winspear:

Hello Ms. Winspear, I was a huge fan of Maisie Dobbs until "A Dangerous Place." That book felt so out of cadence that I have found it difficult to return to the series. What inspired you to take that route in that book?

Jacqueline Winspear Dear Heather, I don't know that any one thing inspired me to write A Dangerous Place, except that it was a story that came to me and that I wanted to tell. And I never wanted every book to be the same - Maisie is on a journey, and this was part of that journey. The whole "mystery" of Maisie is never revealed in one book - my series is more like a saga, following a group of characters through time, and with the events of their era, of life and - of course - the challenges of the case Maisie has taken on, impacting outcomes and how those characters respond to the life they have been dealt . I always wanted to set one of the books at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and Gibraltar was quite an interesting place to be at that time. Every story in the series takes Maisie closer to what will, one day, be the final installment in the overall story I wanted to tell.

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