In 1933 Great Britain is still gripped by the Depression and the lingering personal and social malaise of the Great War. An entire generation, continuing to pay the terrible toll exacted by that war, watches numbly as the tides of war rise to engulf them once again.
Maisie Dobbs tells herself she is happy. Her hard work is reaping its reward, and her private inquiry agency is established and successful. She has achieved not just financial security but real wealth, now that she has inherited the fortune of her late mentor, Maurice Blanche, and can continue and expand upon his good work among the poor and suffering. Her devoted lover, James Compton, is willing and able to transport her to a life of affluence and privilege; she has only to say the word, and they will be married. Maisie knows she should be happy --- and yet she is not. At odd moments she even feels a panicked sense of suffocation.
When old mates of her father Frankie, costermongers from Lambeth, the neighborhood where she lived as a child, ask Maisie to investigate the suspicious "accident" that killed Eddie Pettit, she is eager to help. Eddie, a guileless, gentle man with an amazing rapport for horses, and his mother Maudie, are treasured friends from Maisie's childhood. Honest, kindly and inoffensive people, without an enemy in the world, she would have said.
But when Maisie begins to look more closely into the circumstances surrounding Eddie's "accident," and his unusual behavior in the weeks just before his death, she begins to suspect that this simple man had been drawn, unwillingly, into a very high stakes game indeed, played by powerful and ruthless men who are convinced that the end they seek justifies any and all means. And, even more troubling, there are people whom Maisie respects and admires, who are willing participants in their conspiracy to sway public opinion.
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