I have been in a slump and I didn't want it to get the better of me like it did last time. A friend who happens to work in the library recommended a book that she thought would get me back to reading. We never, ever like the same books but I took the advice. As I was checking out the woman at the desk said she loved the book and the whole series. I told her that M.E. and I had such different tastes in books and she said she did and M.E. did, too. Well this little book written in 2002 did it! I liked it and loved the characters. Not going to read every one immediately but I now have the perfect fallback whenever the news won't let me concentrate. Thank you, M.E. "Maisie Dobbs" by Jacqueline Winspear.

Maurice gets Maisie into *Girton College, Cambridge*. She is meant to be a scholar.

Then *World War I* breaks out in 1914. Maisie leaves Cambridge and goes to France as a *nurse behind the Front*. There she falls in love with a young doctor, Simon, and loses him. The war shatters her.

*1929 - The Case:*

Spring 1929, ten years after the Armistice. Maisie opens her office at 193 Oxford Street. Her motto: _Coincidence is meaningful. Truth is elusive._

Her first client is a suspicious husband: He thinks his wife is having an affair because she disappears to a cemetery.

Maisie follows the wife and finds something completely different. The wife is visiting the grave of the boy she loved and lost in the war. In that same cemetery, Maisie notices many gravestones with only one name on them, and they all lead to one place:

*The Retreat* - a private nursing home / farm in Kent for badly wounded ex-soldiers who are too shattered mentally and physically to live in society. Officially, it's a convalescent home run by a former officer.