Maisie Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs
Written by Jacqueline Winspear

Read by Emilia Fox
Published by John Murray £14.99

I’m looking forward to seeing more of Maisie Dobbs. Here, we’re introduced to her early years – it’s 1910 and Maisie is just 13 years old. Her mother has just died and she starts work as a servant in a Belgravia mansion. She’s a bright girl, but has to forgo her education to work, as her father can’t afford to put her through college.

Maisie loves learning and risks the sack by sneaking into the family’s private library to read. She’s discovered by her employer, Lady Rowan, who recognises Maisie’s potential and enlists the help of a family friend, Maurice Blanche to teach Maisie a few days a week. Unfortunately, World War One looms, and soon after starting at Girton College, Cambridge, Maisie enlists for nursing service in France and as well as growing into a beautiful violet eyed woman, also witnesses the horror of war. She makes friends with some of the women in the all-woman ambulance corps and meets a soldier called Simon who she writes to and inevitably falls in love with.

Emilia Fox, as usual, does a great job with characterisation. Maisie is a very English, refined and humble character, traits that Fox alludes to very well. She flicks between Maisie and gruff war veterans with ease and believability and is a pleasure to listen to.

Twenty-something Maisie opens her Detective Agency in London and her first case is a classic assignment, a man who is worried about a suspected cheating wife. Maisie follows the woman and discovers that she is fixated with the resting place of a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw. She ends up on the trail of a killer linked to The Retreat, a reclusive community of wounded and severely disfigured war veterans whose founder has a hidden agenda .