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Leaving Everything Most Loved
Jacqueline Winspear
2013, 338 pages
Fiction
Maisie Dobbs is an independent woman for her time. Having risen from a position of housemaid at age 13 to working as a nurse during the Great War to becoming a psychologist, she’s now in her late 30s and the owner of her own investigative business.
Her latest client is the brother of Usha Pramal, an Indian woman who was found dead in a South London canal two months earlier. He has just arrived from India and discovered that Scotland Yard has done very little in the way of investigating her death (with the implication that her death wasn’t important enough to warrant the time and energy of the Yard).
Maisie is determined to find out about the woman’s last days, and this leads her to making inquiries about the time leading up to Usha’s departure from India some seven years earlier. All of this research takes her into the dangerous yet fascinating subculture of Indian émigrés in London. She manages to find leads that tie this case to another case she had assigned to one of her associates.
At the same time Maisie is grappling with a marriage proposal from her lover who is soon off to Canada and her desire to go abroad to see some of the world documented by her deceased mentor in his diaries, while equally concerned about what will happen to her employees if she shuts down her office.
A fine mystery with an engaging protagonist with her own demons and insecurities.
This is the tenth in this series, and although it can stand alone, it seems as though it may be the last in this chapter of Maisie’s life, so you might want to start with the first Maisie Dobbs (2004) which won Agatha, Alex, and Macavity awards and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
