Kevin's Watch

I have been reading Maisie Dobbs by Jaqueline Winspear, and am finding it to be one of the finest mystery books I have ever read ~ though certainly not in the usual mold.

When we meet Maisie she is the young proprietor of a fledgling dectective agency in London in the late 1920's.

One of her first cases - determining whether or not a wife is cheating on her husband - should be fairly easy to solve ~ but the case proves to be anything but easy, when it opens up the story of Maisie's own past ~ and opens the wounds she still carries in her heart from her work as a battlefield nurse for Britain in World War I.

Maisie is a wonderful character - cool but compassionate - and views detective work as a way to better both the world and the lives of her clients.

I love Jacqueline Winspear's approach to life. She is a counselor in real life, with an empathic way of relating to people. Our introduction to Maisie on the first page floored me -- she has such elegance and grace of spirit. Winspear has been developing her character through four books. Maisie's cases help her come to grips with her own healing. Beautiful stuff, imo.

I finished reading the third book today, and it kept whispering "Have Loremaster read me" to me.

Not just because of the eloquence of the writing, and the kindness of the spirit - but because almost everything and everyone in the books is affected in some (often subtle but sometimes quite dramatically) way by WW1.

In this, the third book, we have reached the year 1930. While all of Britain is haunted by WW1, and so many suffer from the Great Deperssion, the war to come is casting ugly foreshadowings.

In this book, Maisie has to investigate two cases that take her back to her personal hell - she was a battlefield nurse in the War. Now she has to go back to France to find out the fates of two soldiers believed to be dead in the War.

And in doing so, she must face her own dragons and nightmares eye to eye.