This was excellent. I was enthralled from beginning to end - it wasn't quite a single-sitting read, but very close. Maisie Dobbs, starting her own private investigative firm in the years following WW1, is moving through a world that's defined, almost, by shell shock. Her own experiences as a war-time nurse were horrific, and now, years later, the disfigured victims of that war are turning up dead... ostensibly by their own hand. And the awful thing is, it's so believable. Friends and family don't question it, because the war crushed the living as well as the dead, and though some are walking around, like Maisie, apparently undamaged, the trauma just doesn't go away. The great strength of the book is, I think, the compassionate tone and the steady refusal to look away, even when looking away seems the kind and sensible thing to do. It was just very, very well done - quiet and restrained, and all the more effective for it.