Maisie Dobbs

Jacqueline Winspear’s 2003 debut introduces Maisie Dobbs, who rises from domestic service to study at Cambridge, serves as a nurse in the First World War and in 1929 opens her own detective agency in London. Her first case, an inquiry from a suspicious husband, leads her to a retreat for wounded veterans and back to her own memories of the war. It won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and began a long-running series.