{"id":6860,"date":"2017-10-30T07:34:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T11:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6860"},"modified":"2017-10-30T07:34:25","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T11:34:25","slug":"maisie-dobbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6860","title":{"rendered":"*****Maisie Dobbs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"cup<\/a>

photo: Raheel Shahid, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

Though this book hasn\u2019t acquired the patina of age, the legion of fans for the award-winning 13-book series would no doubt enthusiastically endorse its classic status. Having read the first one, I\u2019m eager to read more.<\/p>\n

Maisie\u2019s story begins in London in 1929, when she opens her office as a \u201cpsychologist and investigator.\u201d She\u2019s enormously advantaged\u2014not because she\u2019s born to the upper classes, like the roughly contemporaneous Lord Peter Wimsey\u2014but because of her own pluck, hard work, and keen insight.<\/p>\n

Her first client is a man who believes his wife\u2019s strange behavior hides a possible dalliance. Maisie shadows the woman and uncovers something quite different behind her mysterious disappearances. Before she will reveal the wife\u2019s sad secret, she makes sure the husband is prepared to act on her findings and thereby to relieve his wife\u2019s distress.<\/p>\n

Maisie\u2019s insights have been cultivated by the celebrated detective Dr. Maurice Blanche. Raised the daughter of a costermonger, financial straits require her to enter service at a young age, and in a long section in the middle of the book, we learn how Maisie\u2019s employer, Lady Rowan, discovers her reading the Lord\u2019s library in the wee hours of the morning. Her intellectual gifts recognized, Maisie\u2019s education is turned over to Lady Rowan\u2019s friend, Dr. Blanche. Hard work subsequently gets her into university. Her academic career, if not her education, is interrupted by World War I, and she serves as an aid station nurse behind the front lines of France.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s 1929, and though the world powers have signed a peace treaty, for many Britons, the Great War is not over. Both the client\u2019s mysterious wife and Lady Rowan\u2019s own son\u2014suffering from what was then called shell-shock and today we call PTSD\u2014have links to a murky organization called The Retreat, which purports to give veterans who simply cannot live in society a safe haven. But is it what it says it is? By combining a clandestine investigation of The Retreat with Maisie\u2019s strong emotional connection to the experiences of war, author Winspear has created a truly compelling story.<\/p>\n

What sets the series apart from the norm is the interplay of psychological elements and Maisie\u2019s strong empathy. Take, for example, the interesting notion drilled into her by Dr. Blanche that, when you pry a story or a confession out of someone, you need to recognize that \u201cthe story takes up space as a knot in a piece of wood. If the knot is removed, a hole remains. We must ask ourselves, how will this hole that we have opened be filled?\u201d In other words, investigators\u2019 responsibilities don\u2019t end when they\u2019ve wrung a confession out of someone.<\/p>\n

The book is written in an easygoing style, and the details of daily life, manners, and attitudes seem to perfectly fit the post-war era in which it is set. Never stodgy, it moves along briskly, in part thanks to strong secondary characters. The occasional clashes in social strata keep things interesting, as dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs<\/em> and Downton Abbey<\/em> exploited so effectively. In Maisie, I\u2019ve found a terrific new literary companion!
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though this book hasn\u2019t acquired the patina of age, the legion of fans for the award-winning 13-book series would no doubt enthusiastically endorse its classic status. Having read the first one, I\u2019m eager to read more. Maisie\u2019s story begins in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****Maisie Dobbs - recently introduced to this entertaining mystery series set in between-the-wars London","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,3,126],"tags":[451,1157,333,1158,129],"class_list":["post-6860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-mystery","category-reading-2","tag-female-protagonist","tag-jacqueline-winspear","tag-london","tag-maisie-dobbs","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1ME","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6862,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6860\/revisions\/6862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}