At different points in her remarkable career, Maisie crosses paths with a military surgeon to whom she's attracted despite his disfigurement from a bomb blast at the front. The Retreat, specializing in treating badly deformed battlefield casualties, is run by an apparently innocuous former officer who requires his patients to sign over their assets to his tightly run institution. Her first sleuthing case, which begins as a simple marital infidelity investigation, leads to a trail of war-wounded soldiers lured to a remote convalescent home in Kent from which no one seems to emerge alive. Both na ve and savvy, Maisie remains loyal to her working-class father and many friends who help her along the way. In Winspear's inspired debut novel, a delightful mix of mystery, war story and romance set in WWI era England, humble housemaid Maisie Dobbs climbs convincingly up Britain's social ladder, becoming in turn a university student, a wartime nurse and ultimately a private investigator.

When Lady Rowan’s son makes plans to join the reclusive community, Maisie hurriedly investigates and finds a disturbing mystery at its core whose resolution gives her the courage to confront the ghost that has haunted her for ten years. The deceased had lived on a cooperative farm called The Retreat, a well-regarded convalescent refuge for those grievously wounded in the war, ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but turns up something else, a tombstone with only a first name-Vincent. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations. Maisie left for France to train as a nurse, then served at the front, where she fell in love with a handsome young doctor.Īfter the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M.

It was he who first recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts. She encouraged Maisie to study at Cambridge, and was aided in this by Maurice Blanche, a friend often retained as an investigator by the elite of Europe when discretion and results were required.

A suffragette, Lady Rowan took the remarkably smart youngster under her wing and became her patron. Lady Rowan Compton first met Maisie when, at thirteen, she went into service as a maid at her ladyship’s Belgravia mansion.

Maisie dobbs books in order