Jacqueline Winspear

Jacqueline Winspear was working in marketing and publishing in the UK, then in California after emigrating in 1990, when she began writing about Maisie Dobbs — a former housemaid turned Cambridge scholar turned WWI battlefield nurse who opens a psychologist-and-investigator practice in 1929 London. The idea was rooted in family history: Winspear's grandfather was severely wounded and shell-shocked in the First World War, and that inheritance of trauma runs through all eighteen Maisie Dobbs novels, which track British history in something close to real time as they move from the late 1920s toward the outbreak of the Second World War. Maisie Dobbs (2003) won the Agatha, Macavity and Alex Awards for best first novel, launching a series better known for literary, character-driven mystery than puzzle-box plotting — closer to historical fiction with a detective's eye for grief and class than a conventional whodunit. Winspear has described The Comfort of Ghosts (2024), which went on to win the Sue Grafton Memorial Award, as the planned conclusion to Maisie's story, giving the series a deliberate ending after two decades. New readers should start at the beginning with Maisie Dobbs itself and read in strict order — the series is tightly serialized around Maisie's personal life and doesn't reward skipping around. Winspear received the Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Award in 2026.