Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability--and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father Frankie Dobbs is not getting any younger. But on a ship bound for England, Maisie realized...

Maisie Dobbs' first assignment for the British Secret Service takes her undercover to Cambridge as a professor, and leads to the investigation of a murderous web of activities being conducted by the up-and-coming Nazi party.

Undertaking a routine investigation into a potential land purchase, Maisie Dobbs arrives in rural Kent, only to be confronted by a number of mysterious fires, a series of petty crimes, and other odd, potentially dangerous occurrences