Elegy for Eddie

Late January, 1933. Maisie Dobbs is met at her office by a group of costermongers, men whom she d known in childhood when her father worked alongside them, selling fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart along the street of London. The men have come to see her about Eddie Pettit, a man known to them all as one who could calm the most challenging horse; a man considered "slow" by those who knew him, but who was gentle and kind, perhaps more boy than man. They want Maisie to discover the truth behind Eddie s violent death, which they believe to be suspicious, yet has been all but ignored by the police. Maisie s investigation takes her well beyond the streets of Lambeth, where Eddie lived; before long, she is following threads of intrigue to John Otterburn, a powerful press baron; to a politician named Winston Churchill - considered a "has been" residing in the hinterlands of power - and, indeed, to the writer Douglas Partridge, the husband of her dearest friend, Priscilla. Elegy for Eddie is the story of a London affected by the march to war, set in step many years before the first gun is fired. An innocent in the shadow of power, Eddie is at the center of one of the most poignant and affecting Maisie Dobbs novels to date.