Maisie Dobbs

By Jacqueline Winspear
I really thought that I would enjoy this book, unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. I found my attention wondering and the characters were never real to me.
Set in the late 1920's England, Maisie Dobbs is a detective. One of her first clients is a Mr. Davenham who suspects that his wife Celia is unfaithful. Maisie takes the case and follows Celia and finds to her surprise that she visits a graveyard. She visits only one grave, that of a man named Vincent. There is nothing else on the tombstone and the grave is rather resent. She finds out that there are quite a few such graves and that all of them belong to WWI vets who came home terribly injured. Most of them had disfiguring facial wounds and they went to live in a place called "The Retreat," a sort of commune of sorts.
Maisie is not a very sympathetic character, she seems like a grown-up version of Nancy Drew. The other characters in the story are equally hazy and boring. She also practices a great deal of "New Age" stuff which seems rather unrealistic for the time as well as annoying.
As soon as the mystery starts, Winspear takes us back to when Maisie was a teenage maid to Lady Rowan and how she gets her education. Then it goes on to show her as a nurse during "The War," and her romance with Simon Lynch, a doctor. This part of the story would have been better if Maisie had been anything but a rather cool and detached person who never seems to feel a great deal of emotion.
It is not until the last third of the book that the story really goes off the rails and becomes rather ludicrous. Now the story goes back to the 20's and Maisie suspects the Retreat of being shady since a great many of it's members died rather mysteriously. This part of the story reads like a badly done version of "Nancy Drew and The Password to Larkspur Lane". Unlike Nancy, Maisie does not even do much of the action and then the ending is so completely unrealistic it was amusing.
On the whole I am probably not going to read the next books in the series.
Reviewed By Elizbeth