Maisie Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs

Author: Jacqueline Winspear

Publisher: Penguin (2004)

ISBN: 0142004332

pages: 320

genre: Mystery

3 (out of 5) STARS

Annotation: Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

Summary: "She started as a maid in an aristocratic London household when she was thirteen. Her employer, Lady Rowan Compton, a suffragette, took the remarkably bright youngster under her wing and became her patron, aided by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe. It was he who first recognized Maisie's intuitive gifts and helped her to earn admission to prestigious Girton College at Cambridge where Maisie planned to complete her education."

"The outbreak of war changed everything. Maisie trained as a nurse, then left for France to serve at the Front, where she found - and lost - an important part of herself." Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets up on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive.

Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but reveals something very different. In the aftermath of the Great War, a former officer has founded a convalescent refuge for those grievously wounded, ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. It is a working farm known as The Retreat. When Fate brings Maisie a second case involving The Retreat she must confront the ghost that has haunted her for over ten years. (www.goodreads.com)

Evaluation: Maisie Dobbs was a big hit in my Reader's Advisory class, but personally I did not love it. The mystery part of the book was okay. But the ending really bothered me; it bothered me enough that I did not much care for the book. When Maisie goes to visit her ex-finance I was surprised to realize he was alive and had been alive in the hospital/nursing home for nearly ten years now since the end of the war. I do not know that Maisie owed him anything, per se, but I was still diappointed in her.

Read-a-likes:

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

Maisie Dobbs Series

1- Maisie Dobbs

2- Birds of a Feather

3- Pardonable Lies

4-Messenger of Truth

5- An Incomplete Revenge

6- Among the Mad

7- The Mapping of Love and Death