Such a disappointment. Maisie Dobbs started well, a bit flat but with a solid premise (spunky female private eye in 1920s with a foot in both the upper and working classes), but it derailed when it dived into a massively long cliche-ridden flashback that took the bulk of the book and added nothing to the theoretically central mystery or making me care about Maisie. The boringly perfect heroine's origin story turned out to be exactly what I assumed from a few lines... But it took Winspear about ten million lines to tell every tedious detail of it. Then, finally, back to the mystery - only to have that wrapped up in a bewildering and laughable few chapters in which the original client was no longer relevant, the denouement literally hinged on the power of music, and Maisie's annoyingly Yodalike Wise Old Mentor predicted the rise of the Nazi party. Um, okay.

Rita Barrington's reading for the audiobook was a 3.5/4 star narration for me, but unfortunately she had terrible material to perform. There's about a dozen more books in the series, and I plan to avoid them.