Maisie Dobbs

by Jacqueline Winspear,

This is the first book in a series about a female detective Maisie Dobbs.

The story is kind of unusual, perhaps a bit unbelievable, but maybe it is realistic.

The book opens with Maisie, a female detective, getting settled into her new office.  One of her first cases comes from a man who suspects his wife is having an affair as she spends long periods of time out of the house.  Maisie follows her and finds out she visits the grave of a soldier (whom she loved).
She finds graves with only the soldier's first names on them, she is intrigued by this.

The story then switches to years prior to the first world war.  We are introduced to a young Maisie and her father.  He is a widower who uses his horse and cart to sell fresh produce.  He loves his daughter but they are very poor.  He doesn't want to see her starve or suffer so makes arrangements for her to be hired on as a household worker at the home of one of his clients.

She does her job well and works long hours, but when she discovers the huge library in the house she starts arising even earlier in the morning, 3 am , to have time to sneak into the library to read.  She doesn't just read fiction, she reads philosophy and even tries to learn Latin.

One night the family members arrive home late from a party and discover her in the library.  She thinks she will be sacked but instead the wife of the household wants to help her.  They agree to let her study, under the guidance of a family friend, if she does her studying and coaching on her own time.  She eagerly agrees.  She is a diligent student and eventually passes the exams to be admitted to a woman's college at Cambridge.  Her father is proud of her but afraid of losing her...

She is working on her education but when WWI arrives everyone' lives are turned upside down.  The death of one of her former co-workers prompts her to leave her exams and volunteer to become a nurse in the war effort.  She works hard in hospitals near the front lines in France, sees a lot of tragedy and is the victim of a tragedy herself.  We don't learn the details about this until the end of the book.

Maisie sees a young doctor she met just prior to the war and they fall in love.  He asks her to marry him but for some reason she hesitates to say yes.  Yes, he is a higher social status than she, but that is not really what bothers her.

Then we jump back to the "present" in the book and find that Maisie's sponsors are concerned about their son who has returned from the war with post traumatic stress.  He is thinking of going to live at a farm for soldiers called the Retreat.  They want her to check into it for them.  As the single named soldiers are also affiliated with this estate she is eager to investigate.  We learn that Maisie's teacher/mentor is the person who groomed her to be a detective.  Maisie has recruited a young man who has helped her get her office set up to go to the Retreat.  At first everything seems fine, the place seems to be helping the men who live there.  Then the young "plant' phones Maisie to say that one of the soldiers who had wanted to leave has disappeared.  Maisie tells him to get out quickly but when she goes to pick him up at their planned rendezvous place he is not there.  She ends up saving him from being murdered for "desertion" by the Major who runs the Retreat.  We then learn that Maisie's lover was badly injured in an attack on the hospital where he and she were working and he is an invalid, probably brain damaged.

The author did a fabulous job of portraying the impact of WWI on people.  The characters are interesting.  The things I wonder about 1) would a serving girl be singled out and sponsored for an education like Maisie was? 2) If this unlikely candidate for education got a university education would she really become an investigator?  If you can suspend disbelief in these regards, she has written an interesting mystery tale.