The White Lady
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Average rating3.7
The White Lady introduces yet another extraordinary heroine from Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the best-selling Maisie Dobbs series. This heart-stopping novel, set in Post WWII Britain in 1947, follows the coming of age and maturity of former wartime operative Elinor White--veteran of two wars, trained killer, protective of her anonymity--when she is drawn back into the world of menace she has been desperate to leave behind. A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government. The private, quiet "Miss White" as Elinor is known, lives in a village in rural Kent, England, and to her fellow villagers seems something of an enigma. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation. But the residents of Shacklehurst have no way of knowing how dangerous Elinor's war work had been, or that their mysterious neighbor is haunted by her past. It will take Susie, the child of a young farmworker, Jim Mackie and his wife, Rose, to break through Miss White's icy demeanor--but Jim has something in common with Elinor. He, too, is desperate to escape his past. When the powerful Mackie crime family demands a return of their prodigal son for an important job, Elinor assumes the task of protecting her neighbors, especially the bright-eyed Susie. Yet in her quest to uncover the truth behind the family's pursuit of Jim, Elinor unwittingly sets out on a treacherous path - yet it is one that leads to her freedom.
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Jacqueline Winspear takes a break from her long-running Maisie Dobbs series to give us a story about a woman who is trying to deal with stress brought on by her experiences in two world wars. (I suppose what we would now call PTSD.)
It is the late 1940s. Elinore White is just trying to live a quiet life and, if not forget about her past, then at least come to accept it. Of course that is not to be. When London gangsters show up, she reluctantly has to break out old skills.
At first this story seemed somewhat unfocused to me. It is told on three timelines and it seemed to me that much of it was just giving Elinor White's backstory, which I suspected could have been done more economically without all the time jumps. But, I should have trusted Winspear's storytelling fu. As the story progresses, she pulls all the threads together very nicely indeed. There are bad guys of various stripes – some worse than others. There are innocents that need protecting. There is a deep mystery to unravel. And, the MC has demons to expunge.
I have to wonder if this is a one-off or if Jacqueline Winspear is going to start a new series with her Elinore White character? Time will tell, I suppose.
Anyway, quite a good story. Solid 4 stars.
A satisfying “mystery” about a former Belgian saboteur for the Allies during World Wars I and II. Elinor has tried to live a quiet life after a whole lot of wartime trauma, but her instincts to protect her neighbors — a young couple with a small daughter — get amped up when the husband's Crime Mob family comes calling. I'd read and enjoyed previous Winspear books (quite a few of the Maisie Dobbs books before I fell off that wagon), and when this one was picked for my neighborhood book club, I thought sure! Why not!
So Elinor and Maisie have some overlap, even though Elinor is not a detective per se — she developed a friendship with a detective when they were both stationed with an organization during the Second World War, and so she works with him trying to learn more the Crime Mob family, but he keeps kinda brushing her off, so what's a former spy to do but do all the legwork herself?
Satisfying in that it all wrapped up in a little bow, and that Elinor was able to set boundaries for herself about who she would and would not be seeing again after releasing the wartime memories, but not necessarily from a bad-guy-goes-to-jail perspective.
