Only a few months has elapsed since Maisie investigated the gruesome death of costermonger Eddie Petit, in 1933. Her trustworthy assistant Billy Boggs was badly beaten during that investigation, leaving all of the investigative work to Maisie. She is contacted by an Indian gentleman who has come to England in the hopes of finding out who killed his sister two months previous. Scotland Yard failed to make any arrest in the case, and there is reason to believe they failed to conduct a thorough investigation.
The case becomes even more challenging when another Indian woman is murdered just hours before a scheduled interview. Meanwhile, unfinished business from a previous case becomes a distraction, as does a new development in Maisie's personal life.These novels have always considered the class stratification that is British life; Maisie has transcended both gender and class rules, but race enters the picture in this novel. The British are clearly prejudiced against the Indians despite their colonization of the subcontinent. Maisie does a brilliant job of putting the class and race hatred in its place as she solves this difficult crime.
Bringing a crucial chapter in the life and times of Maisie Dobbs to a close, Leaving Everything Most Loved marks a pivotal moment in this outstanding mystery series.
368 pages
1932 finds Maisie Dobbs being asked to take an first assignment for the British Secret Service! She leaves her business in her assistants' hands and goes undercover to Cambridge as a Classics professor—and leads to the
investigation of a web of activities being conducted by the emerging
Nazi Party. 
In this mystery, the psychologist/investigator, Miss Maisie Dobbs must dig deep into a village's long-buried
secrets. The adult son of Maisie's benefactors, Lord and Lady Compton, tycoon James Compton, wants to buy an
estate in the bucolic hamlet of Heronsdene, but is wary after a string
of mysterious fires. Maisie soon proves Compton's suspicions correct
when she encounters the shady current landowner and a vaguely menacing
band of Romas (Gypsies) in town for the seasonal harvest. The locals are also
curiously tight-lipped about Heronsdene's wartime tragedy, when a
zeppelin raid wiped out a family. Teasing out Heronsdene's secrets will
take all the intrepid former nurse's psychological skills and test her
ability to navigate between the Roma and gorja (non-Roma)
worlds. Winspear vividly evokes England between the wars, when the old
order crumbled and new horizons beckoned working women like her
appealing heroine.
Somehow I began this series with the second book, but one of the best features of the series is each book's ability to stand on its own. Maisie is an intelligent, clever woman working as a private investigator and psychologist in and around London, during the period between the world wars. Her background makes her uniquely suited for the work; she began life under the stairs as a serving girl in a great house in London. However, starved for knowledge, she would sneak up into the grand library and spend her nights reading, which came to the attention of her employer, suffragette Lady Rowan Compton. She became Maisie's patron, taking the remarkably bright youngster under her
wing. Lady Rowan's friend, Maurice Blanche, often retained as an
investigator by the European elite, recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts
and helped her earn admission to the prestigious Girton College in
Cambridge, where Maisie planned to complete her education. But when the first World War broke out, she lied about her age and went to the front as a nurse. The station where she worked was destroyed by artillery fire leaving her injured and the doctor she had fallen in love with, a shell of a man. The writer is vague about his injuries, but he remains in hospital the rest of his life, unable to speak. Maisie returned to her studies and an apprenticeship with Maurice Blanche, which explains how she came to her career as an investigator with profiling skills.
I turned to this from a Goodreads recommendation after reading The Girl in the Spider's Web, for Jussi Adler-Olsen is a Danish author who writes intricate mysteries, just as Steig Larsson did. This was a worthy choice. It introduces Carl Mørck, a detective who has just survived an ambush in which one of his colleagues is killed and the other is paralyzed. Carl hesitated a moment and did not draw his weapon, so he is wracked with guilt; the last thing he expects is a promotion, but the promotion to Department Q is really to get rid of him. It is a department of one, save the Syrian immigrant who is assigned to clean, but there is much more to Assad than initially meets the eye. Carl is assigned very cold cases, which no one really expects him to solve, but then they didn't really know Carl Mørck.