Maisie Dobbs (Hardcover)

The prose is redolent of its place and time and, even though Maisie may be a revisionist, she's most refreshingly wonderful if too pure and serious. Can't wait for the next Maisie mystery.

The story is rather awkwardly divided into three chunks: in the first chunk, the reader is introduced to Maisie and a few of the people that make up her world. Her client arrives, provides her with the problem that will become the book's mystery and then...

We come to a screeching halt as the second chunk is introduced: Maisie's backstory, her rise from the bright daughter of a humble costermonger to her time in service to an aristocratic family, to her education and subsequent attendance at Oxford and finally her time in France, tending the wounded during WWI.

Then, once all this exposition is out of the way, it's back to the present (1929) and our mystery, which, if the author is lucky, her readers have not forgotten about. Once the mystery is resolved, a few loose ends from Maisie's backstory are tied up and everyone is happy.

The problem with the way this book is constructed is that the introduction of what is basically a huge chunk of exposition brings the engine of this story to a complete stop. For more than 100 pages. This is never a good idea. It's okay to weave backstory into the plot a few pages at a time, over the course of the book, in fact, that method offers a lot of advantages. But to just completely drop the narrative thread for 100 pages and cram your main character's biography into the middle of an ongoing puzzle is to risk having your readers walk away in boredom. I know I almost did.

The mystery itself is thin and its resolution left a lot to be desired. Most people will see it coming from a long way off. And like the mystery, I also found many of Maisie's interactions with the other characters to be pat and unsatisfying. Many scenes that should have had more depth and feeling to them seemed rushed. I had the feeling that I was reading a book that hadn't been written so much as it had been outlined. Those criticisms aside, I will say that the minor characters are, for the most part, very well rendered. I particularly liked Enid, Maisie's room-mate during her time in service. I can understand what the author did with Enid, because if the saucy red-headed maid had stuck around much longer, she'd have taken over completely. She was a much more interesting character than Maisie herself.

Finally, I simply cannot see how Maisie Dobbs merited Edgar and Agatha nominations. While it has its interesting points, Maisie Dobbs is simply not of that caliber.