A milestone in historical mystery fiction as Maisie Dobbs takes her final bow!

The Comfort of Ghosts completes Jacqueline Winspear's ground-breaking and internationally bestselling series.

"An outstanding historical series."--The New York Times

"Winspear is a brilliant writer, mixing the history and the mystery with the psychology of criminals and victims."--The Historical Novel Society

Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs unravels a profound mystery from her past in a war-torn nation grappling with its future.

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion--the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group.

Maisie is deeply puzzled by the children's reticence. They are evasive when telling their stories and, more mysteriously, they appear to possess hand-to-hand combat skills one might expect of trained adults in wartime. Her quest to bring comfort to the youngsters and the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie's first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental aircraft. As Maisie picks apart the threads of her dead husband's life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.

The award-winning Maisie Dobbs series has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, readers drawn to a woman who is of her time, yet familiar in ours--and who inspires with her resilience and capacity for endurance. This final assignment of her own choosing not only opens a new future for Maisie and her family, but serves as a fascinating portrayal of the challenges facing the people of Britain at the close of the Second World War.