In Winspear's inspired debut novel, a delightful mix of mystery, war story and romance set in WWI-era England, humble housemaid Maisie Dobbs climbs convincingly up Britain's social ladder, becoming in turn a university student, a wartime nurse and ultimately a private investigator. Both na?ve and savvy, Maisie remains loyal to her working-class father and many friends who help her along the way. Her first sleuthing case, which begins as a simple marital infidelity investigation, leads to a trail of war-wounded soldiers lured to a remote convalescent home in Kent from which no one seems to emerge alive. The Retreat, specializing in treating badly deformed battlefield casualties, is run by an apparently innocuous former officer who requires his patients to sign over their assets to his tightly run institution. At different points in her remarkable career, Maisie crosses paths with a military surgeon to whom she's attracted despite his disfigurement from a bomb blast at the front. A refreshing heroine, appealing secondary characters and an absorbing plot, marred only by a somewhat bizarre conclusion, make Winspear a new writer to watch. Agent, Amy Rennert. (July 9) Forecast: Blurbs from Elizabeth George and Charles Todd will alert their readers to the quality of this book, which ought to draw mainstream and romance readers as well. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

"THIS COUNTRY IS at war with Germany." With those chilling words from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, delivered over the airwaves on the morning of Sept. 3,1939, Britain plunges back into the darkness of another world war. The English stiffen their collective spine and rally, as they always do. "We're made of strong fabric, all of us," declares Maisie Dobbs in Jacqueline Winspear's new mystery, in this grave hour (Harper, $27.99). But the toll these fresh hostilities take on Maisie and her friends will be a severe test of their resolve, measured in more lives lost, more families torn apart and more shellshocked veterans returning home with "that look, that stare" in their eyes. Having once served honorably as a spy, Maisie is soon recruited by the Secret Service to investigate the assassination of a Belgian refugee, one of the 7,000 to 8,000 Belgians who remained in England after the war. Winspear expands this criminal investigation into a far-reaching look at the contributions of Belgian citizens to the previous conflict, including the efforts of the wives, mothers and sisters of resistance fighters. "The Germans couldn't believe old women could cause much trouble and only looked for the boys," one veteran recalls with some satisfaction. Meanwhile, England is preparing for the coming onslaught, which everyone predicts will be fought in the skies. Children are being evacuated to the countryside, and women are signing up for the Auxiliary Ambulance Service. And although people keep forgetting to carry their gas masks, most are careful to use blackout curtains. (Of course, some Britons might think they're showing their patriotism by trying to kill "enemy" dogs like German shepherds and dachshunds.) As time goes on, more and more refugees pour into England, and while Winspear maintains her focus on the volunteers and charitable organizations involved in their rescue and relocation, her portraits of individual evacuees like Anna, a homeless waif so traumatized she has stopped speaking, are enough to break your heart. "She takes all her things with her everywhere," Maisie's stepmother observes, "bundles everything into that little case and won't let it out of her sight." STEPHEN DOBYNS HASN'T Written a Charlie Bradshaw mystery in ages, so reading Saratoga payback (Blue Rider, $27) feels like returning for old home week. When no-good Mickey Martin turns up dead on Charlie's front sidewalk, the retired (and unlicensed) private eye has to sneak around Lt. Frank Hutchins of the Saratoga Police Department to investigate. He must also take time off from delivering the ransom money for Bengal Lancer, a stallion worth over a million bucks in stud fees, part of a vicious crime wave that has already cost some magnificent horses their heads. Retirement doesn't sit well with Charlie ("I've been reading and tinkering, and now I'm bored"). He'd much rather be buying a shotgun ("Its potency made up for Charlie's growing sense of decrepitude") or interviewing people like Bad Maud, a bartender at the Greasy Mattress biker bar. (Bad Maud used to be Good Maud, but that was a long time ago.) Charlie has lost none of his charm, nor Dobyns his wry wit, so consider this novel a rare gift. WHAT BETTER SETTING for a Gothic murder mystery than 19thcentury Edinburgh? Especially with "resurrection men" plundering the cemeteries and lady "undergraduettes" permitted to dissect cadavers at the university's famed medical school. Kaite Welsh relishes these surroundings in her pungent first book, THE WAGES OF SIN (Pegasus Crime, $25.95). Sarah Gilchrist is one of the few, brave women studying for medical degrees, but she blanches like a timid girl when she recognizes the corpse on her dissection table as Lucy Collins, a pregnant streetwalker she'd met at St. Giles's Infirmary for Women and Children, the charity clinic where she serves as a volunteer. Welsh makes sure to introduce a bit of romance into her story ("There was a spark to him, a sort of magnetism," Sarah says of her chemistry professor), but she's primarily interested in the political and social conditions of the period - especially the "completely unnecessary" hysterectomies; the young women disowned by their families after being raped; the rickets and whooping cough endured by slum children; and the phosphorus necrosis that destroys the faces of women working in match factories. Welcome to the medical profession, Miss Gilchrist. DAVID JOY'S BLEAKLY beautiful tales of the rapacious drug culture of the Appalachian mountain dwellers of Jackson County, N.C., have a dreadful consistency. Every day, it seems, there's "another story of another man killing another man in another godforsaken town." In THE WEIGHT OF THIS WORLD (Putnam, $27), a boy like Aiden McCall knows that "in time he would become his father" - a man who told his wife he loved her before shooting her in the head and killing himself. That alone should explain why Aiden would choose a brute like Thad Broom for his best friend, remaining loyal even when Thad returns from military service "malformed and hardened by bitterness and anger." Their friendship forms the spine of this gorgeously written but pitiless novel about a region blessed by nature but reduced to desolation and despair.

From its dedication to the author's paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, who were both injured during World War I, to its powerful conclusion, this is a poignant and compelling story that explores war's lingering and insidious impact on its survivors. The book opens in spring 1929 as Maisie Dobbs opens an office dedicated to "discreet investigations" and traverses back and forth between her present case and the long shadows cast by World War I. What starts out as a plea by an anxious husband for Maisie to discover why his wife regularly lies about her whereabouts turns into a journey of discovery whose answers and indeed whose very questions lie in a quiet rural cemetery where many war dead are buried. In Maisie, Winspear has created a complex new investigator who, tutored by the wise Maurice Blanche, recognizes that in uncovering the actions of the body, she is accepting responsibility for the soul. British-born but now living in America, first novelist Winspear writes in simple, effective prose, capturing the post-World War I era effectively and handling human drama with compassionate sensitivity while skillfully avoiding cloying sentimentality. At the end, the reader is left yearning for more discreet investigations into the nature of what it means to feel truth. Highly recommended.-Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Adult/High School-Maisie is 14 when her mother dies, and she must go into service to help her father make ends meet. Her prodigious intellect and the fact that she is sneaking into the manor library at night to read Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung alert Lady Rowan to the fact that she has an unusual maid. She arranges for Maisie to be tutored, and the girl ultimately qualifies for Cambridge. She goes for a year, only to be drawn by the need for nurses during the Great War. After serving a grueling few years in France and falling in love with a young doctor, Maisie puts up a shingle in 1929 as a private investigator. She is a perceptive observer of human nature, works well with all classes, and understands the motivations and demons prevalent in postwar England. Teens will be drawn in by her first big case, seemingly a simple one of infidelity, but leading to a complex examination of an almost cultlike situation. The impact of the war on the country is vividly conveyed. A strong protagonist and a lively sense of time and place carry readers along, and the details lead to further thought and understanding about the futility and horror of war, as well as a desire to hear more of Maisie. This is the beginning of a series, and a propitious one at that.-Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI. Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds--both those to the body and those to the soul. It's just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman's preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie's upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn't really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie's investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble--yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client's wife's preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived. Prime candidate for a TV movie. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.