London, 1929. Maisie Dobbs opens her own investigation agency after rising from domestic service through education at Girton College and an apprenticeship with psychologist-investigator Maurice Blanche. A routine inquiry into suspected marital infidelity leads her to a secluded community offering refuge to men disfigured and traumatised by the First World War.
The case forces Maisie back to her own service as a battlefield nurse and to the love and loss she has tried to contain since 1917. To identify the danger concealed behind the retreat’s charitable purpose, she must connect a present death with the continuing psychological wounds of veterans and with choices made when she was still learning how war alters every life it touches.