The Nature of Things

In Maisie Dobbs' world, it is the autumn of 1940 and London is suffering under Hitler's vaunted blitzkrieg. Most of Europe has fallen to Germany's onslaught and Britain now stands alone in opposing them. Churchill's "few," the RAF, are doing their heroic best to counter the blitz, and, in this effort, they are being helped by many American fliers who have come to join their fight.  Back in America, the isolationists, led by people like Charles Lindberg, still hold sway. FDR, sympathetic to the British cause, does all he can to aid them, but he is unable to actually send troops. Other Americans, particularly journalists, have also come to aid the British. Their aid is in the form of reporting events back to their country and giving their fellow Americans a bird's-eye view of what is happening under the blitz. Of course, the most famous of these was Edward R. Murrow, but in Jacqueline Winspear's telling, there is also a young woman journalist called Cath...

We first met Maisie Dobbs in the years before World War I when she was a young girl who had lost her mother and was being raised by her father. Her father found a position for her as a maid to an aristocratic family. That benevolent family took an interest in the young girl and helped to educate her. Her relationship with the family was the making of her. It was through them that she became the person that she was as an adult, and eventually, she married the son of the family and emigrated to Canada. But tragedy followed her. Her husband was killed and she returned to England. In this latest installment, we have progressed all the way to the beginnings of World War II. It is 1940 and England is on edge. It has not been attacked directly yet, but an attack is expected imminently. Meanwhile, their forces in Europe are being pushed back to the sea. The Dunkirk rescue looms. Maisie is still pursuing her profession as an investigator and psychologist, ably assisted by her longtime right...

September 1939. Very soon a state of war will exist between England and Germany.  Appeasement has failed. It will never succeed with a bully; they always demand more. The title of this book is taken from the king's speech at the beginning of England's war. Faithful readers of this series, myself included, have now followed Maisie Dobbs from her late childhood before World War I, through that war where she served as a military nurse and was seriously injured along with the doctor with whom she was in love, and after the war as she began to recover from her wounds and accepted that Simon, her doctor lover, never would, and began to build her business as a private investigator and psychologist. We've seen her fall in love again after Simon's death and eventually marry and become pregnant, only to see her husband die in the crash of the plane he was testing and herself delivering a stillborn child on that same day. After a stint in Spain helping the Republicans in their war...

Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 4 of 5 stars With Journey to Munich , the twelfth and most recent in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, we've now spent more than twenty years in the company of this character; from the years just before the beginning of World War I to 1938, the time of this novel. We've followed Maisie from a child whose mother had just died and whose father gave her into domestic service with an aristocratic family, through her fortunate years and her education with that family, to the trenches of France as a nurse in the Great War, and afterward as she set up her business as a private investigator and psychologist. We saw her marry the son of the family with whom she had been in domestic service and then lose him in an airplane crash in Canada and, on the same day, lose the child she was carrying. In the last book, we saw her on her way home after those terrible events, stopping off in Gibraltar and getting involved in the Span...

A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 4 of 5 stars It is 1937 and Europe is on the inexorable path that will lead to World War II. Maisie Dobbs is in Gibraltar, the strategic position of which makes it invaluable as a listening post for many countries. Spies seem to be lurking around every corner and some of them are inordinately interested in what Maisie is doing. And what is Maisie doing? Well, she is trying to come to terms with a recent double tragedy in her life. She had married her lover, James Compton, and moved with him to Canada where he was employed testing aircraft that would play an integral part in any war to come. It was a happy time for her. She was eight months pregnant with their first child. Then catastrophe struck. The plane that James was testing went down in a fiery crash and James was killed. This all happened as Maisie watched. She started running toward the crash site, tripped and fell. Her child was delivered early and was dead. On one momentous ...

Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars I decided to go ahead and read the last Jacqueline Winspear book that I had on Kindle just to get it out of my queue. It had been there for a long time and I was tired of seeing it. It turns out that this entry marks something of an end to one chapter of Maisie Dobbs' life and so it is a good "ending," a good place for me to pause in my reading of the Dobbs saga and move on to something else for a while. Dobbs is dissatisfied with her life. She is a successful businesswoman, fabulously wealthy thanks to a bequest from her mentor, has a good and caring (and rich) man as a lover, and is well-respected everywhere she goes. In short, everyone loves Maisie, so why wouldn't she be discontented? Yeah, right! This is actually one of the things that annoys me about this character. She really seems to have little actual depth of understanding of just how lucky she is. Oh, she gives lip service to such...

Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars Maisie Dobbs has come a long way since her impoverished childhood in Lambeth. This daughter of a costermonger, having been lucky in her mentors and also a willing student and hard worker, has parlayed all of her resources into a successful career as a businesswoman, a private detective/psychologist. She is extremely wealthy, thanks to a bequest from her mentor. She is respected in the community and retains her ties to her old neighborhood, as well. She has a wealthy, titled lover, Viscount James Crompton, the son of the family who did so much for her education when she was a child. Crompton loves her and wants to marry her, but Maisie is unsure of how she feels about that. In fact, for such an accomplished and successful woman, Maisie is unsure about a lot of things. It seems that what she is very sure of is what is best for those that she cares about, her father and her employees, primarily. She tends to try to manipulat...

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars This eighth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series was a bit slow getting started and there were parts of it that didn't ring true for me, that seemed a bit "off" - I'm not quite sure how else to explain it - so, on the whole, I can't say it is one of my favorites. Still, it wasn't a stinker. It just wasn't as entertaining as some. This book actually marks a bit of a turning point in the series. Up until now, the focus has been on the events of World War I and the years following that war. Now, we have arrived at the 1930s and Maisie herself is in her 30s and is a successful businesswoman. There is unrest in Germany. The Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler are near to being able to take over the country and the philosophy espoused by Hitler is finding adherents in other countries as well. Including England. In the beginning, Maisie finds herself being followed and determines that it is the polic...

The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars Jacqueline Winspear still mines the trenches of World War I in this seventh entry in the Maisie Dobbs series. It is 1932, more than a decade past the end of hostilities and yet the war continues to have repercussions in Dobbs' life and the lives of her clients. Her clients this time are an elderly American couple searching for their son's past. Mr. and Mrs. Clifton have recently been informed that their son's remains - he had been listed as missing in the war - have been found in France. Among their son's belongings were found some letters from an English nurse whom he had met and had apparently had an affair with. The parents hire Maisie to find the woman, who must now be in her thirties. The son, Michael, had been a gifted cartographer and it was in that capacity that he served the British Army. In August 1914, he had been mapping the land he had just purchased in the Santa Ynez Valley in Ca...

Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars It's Christmas Eve 1931 in Maisie Dobbs' world, more than ten years past the end of the Great War that was to "end all wars." The war goes on though for so many of those who participated in it. Millions of men and women who were grievously wounded either physically or psychologically - or both - continue to struggle with their wounds and with trying to make a place for themselves in the world. Maisie Dobbs' work as a psychologist and investigator often seems to bring her into contact with these desperate people and that is the case once again in Among the Mad . It begins with Maisie walking down a London street with her assistant Billy Beale, on their way to meet with a client. Suddenly, Maisie gets one of her premonitions. She orders her assistant to go back as she walks forward toward a disabled man sitting on the street. He has one missing leg and the other injured and Maisie feels the distress comin...

An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 3 of 5 stars It's been quite a while since I checked in on Maisie Dobbs. Time to remedy that. An Incomplete Revenge is the fifth entry in Jacqueline Winspear's series of mysteries featuring psychologist/private investigator Dobbs, a former military nurse during World War I who is forever scarred, both physically and emotionally, by that experience. The time is 1931. The world has moved on from the conflagration of war and the chaos of the immediate post-war period, but a new shadow is cast by economic uncertainty. Maisie is worried about the survival of her struggling private investigation business in such times. In the midst of such worries, she receives a seemingly straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate the situation in a small rural community where there is an estate that he is considering purchasing. There is a worrisome pattern of petty crimes and fires in the area and Maisie's client wants...

Artist Nicholas Bassington-Hope is a lightning rod, attracting both passionate admiration from his supporters and passionate anger and even hate from his detractors. On the night before the opening of his exhibition at a famed Mayfair gallery, Bassington-Hope falls to his death from some scaffolding as he prepares to hang his masterpiece. He was alone at the time. Or was he? Was it really an accident or was it murder? The police rule an accident. His twin sister Georgina isn't so sure.  On the advice of her former mentor at Girton College, Georgina enlists the aid of fellow Girton graduate Maisie Dobbs to investigate and discover the truth. As Maisie pursues her inquiries, she finds herself strongly attracted to the Bohemian lifestyle of the Bassington-Hope family, artists all, except for the eldest daughter Noelle, the practical one in the family. At the same time, Maisie's personal life is in a shambles, as she struggles to find a civil way to break off a romantic relationshi...

The year is 1930, more than ten years after the end of the Great War. Still, England and Europe are mired in the past. They cannot forget all that they have lost. The pain and suffering continue as they try to honor the memories of the dead, while getting on with their lives. What is true of her country is also true of Maisie Dobbs of London, psychologist and private investigator. She continues to be called on to investigate and resolve cases related to the war and war injuries and deaths. Now, she is being asked by Sir Cedric Lawton to prove that his son, Ralph, is truly dead. Ralph was an aviator in the war and was reported to have died in a fiery crash in France, but his mother never believed that he was dead. She continued to try to prove her belief through the use of mediums and spiritualists. Her obsession had finally driven her mad, but on her deathbed, she extracted a promise from her husband, Sir Cedric, that he would continue the search and finally prove whether or not their ...

Maisie Dobbs has been on her own as a private investigator/psychologist for about a year in this second entry in Jacqueline Winspear's well-written series. She has gained a new office, new living quarters, and an assistant, Billy Beale, and she has gained some measure of respect from the police, especially Detective Inspector Stratton of Scotland Yard. She is contacted by a self-made, brash, and impatient businessman named Joseph Waite (An impatient businessman named Waite. Get it? Sorry, couldn't resist!) It seems that Waite's daughter, 32-year-old Charlotte, has run away from the family home and Waite wants her found and brought back immediately if not sooner. Meantime, the police are investigating the murder of a young woman about Charlotte's age, but before the crime can be solved, another young woman is murdered in similar fashion. As Maisie proceeds in her search for the missing woman, she discovers that there may be a link between her and the murdered women. Then...

Isabel Dalhousie, meet Maisie Dobbs. That's what I was thinking as I delved into this first book of Jacqueline Winspear's popular series. The character of Maisie at first reminded me a great deal of Isabel. Both are philosophers and psychologists, and are deeply intuitive people who rely on those intuitions to understand and solve mysteries. As I got further into the book, though, I found significant differences. For one thing, I liked Maisie a lot, whereas I often find Isabel irritating and exasperating in the extreme with her constant agonizing over the moral issues of  everything . ("Shall I wear the pink blouse or the white blouse today? Which is the moral choice? What would David Hume do?") Maisie is a more down-to-earth, practical sort of person who lives in the real world of England ten years after the Great War and has real problems. I suppose one of the things which makes Maisie a more sympathetic character for me is the fact that she comes from the working c...