One of the joys of the ebook is that a reader can easily access the full series of an author’s works.  Rather than wondering at the on-going peculiarities of these sleuths, one can start with their introduction in the first novel, and follow them through the maturation of their skills.

One of these detectives is Maisie Dobbs, like her creator Jacqueline Winspear, an Englishwoman.  Maisie employs her detecting and psychological skills to solve crimes between World War I and II.  Both the crimes and their detection are challenging, but as a setting for this process Winspear portrays everyday life during the interwar period and the complex experience of loss and waste of human life that leads to crime. 

              As a child Maisie was raised by her widowed father, a barrow grocer, and as an adolescent sent into service.  Her employers quickly saw her potential, and sponsored her university education until the outbreak of World War I called her to volunteer as a nurse in France.  Her academic education was rapidly enhanced by the experience of war, the love and loss of a young doctor, and her physical and emotional wounding.  Maisie returned to England where she encountered Maurice Blanche, a physician and psychologist who instructed her in the science of crime investigation.  Her career as a detective began. 

Now in Winspear’s eleventh novel Maisie has solved as many major cases and has lived to see the threat of a new war.  Each novel explores a new English setting and the social problems of the period:  the unemployment and neglect of veterans; the criminal consequences of shell shock (the traumatic stress disorder of the time); social inequalities and racial tensions; poverty and abuse.  As Maisie solves the crimes, she becomes enmeshed in these settings and disorders, and  she herself matures into a most competent detective and mature woman, a lover, wife and widow.

The eleventh novel begins a new period both in Maisie’s life and in that of England and Europe.  In A Dangerous Place, Maisie immerses herself in a murder that takes place in Gibraltar and leads her into the thick of the Spanish Civil War.  The twelfth novel announced for publication in February 2016 promises to continue the exploration of the pre World War II through the criminal intrigues of Munich – I can hardly wait!