There’s something strange about the title character of Jacqueline Winspear’s deft debut novel, Maisie Dobbs, which opens in London in 1929. For a clever and resourceful young woman who has just set herself up in business as a private investigator, Maisie seems a bit too sober and much too sad. Romantic readers sensing a story-within-a-story won’t be disappointed at the sensitivity and wisdom with which Maisie resolves her first professional assignment, an apparent case of marital infidelity that turns out to be a wrenching illustration of the sorrowful legacies of World War I.
‘My job is rather more complex than you might have imagined,’ says Maisie, citing her moral responsibility to restore some equilibrium to the people whose lives she disrupts. Since these people are the most severely wounded veterans of war—men shattered in mind and body—her psychological approach proves especially humane. But when Maisie’s investigation into a convalescent home for such men sends her back in time to her experiences as a battlefield nurse, she must face her own nightmares. Winspear takes her through her ordeal with compassion—and the promise of brighter days ahead.