I started to read these a few years ago, and am currently reading the latest in paperback. The author is English, but has lived in the USA for many years. Maisie Dobbs, a working class girl who by good fortune, gets a first class education, and makes a couple of friends that will help her in life - with support, not money, is a real heroine. She lives and works in London - her office is near Warren Street Tube station. The books are set in the period between WW1 and WW2, and each can be read as a stand alone, but as a series they knit together well, and if read in order they will tell a whole story. Maisie had a fiance, a doctor, but he was shell shocked in the first world war and never recovered from that. What makes her different from the usual detective is that she is a phsychologist , and has great empathy with those who need it. She is also a "new woman" quite unusual at that time - single, own business, employs a male assistant, and manages, throughout each book, to take you with her, through her investigations and her own private thoughts and feelings, in a quite different way from the normal detective series. Indeed, the crimes she solves are not always murders, and quite often she must deal with the feelings of a client rather than any crime she has been asked to solve. She drives a rather dinky sports car too. I like her very much. The series is as follows:
Maisie Dobbs
Birds of a Feather
Pardonable Lies
Messenger of Truth
An Incomplete Revenge
Among the Mad
The Mapping of Love and Death
Mac-Adventures (with books! I read an eclectic mix of books, some years old, rarely prizewinners, sometimes on bestseller lists but more than likely not: but the ones I like I'll tell you about...... if you read them too, let me know! You may also find Gardening here, Home and Furniture makeovers; sometimes Food, Travel tales..... but mostly, Books.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Early One Morning - Virginia Baily
I was attracted to this novel purely by the cover (as I suppose this is meant to happen!) and it has very little about the contents on the b...
-
Despite his announcements that he would find the truth - the once great detective Shermouse Holmes and his travelling caravan have returned ...
-
Beg, borrow, or steal a copy of this very short novel (140 pages only), and delight yourself! Ezekiel Murphy, a West Indian living in Lon...
No comments:
Post a Comment