The White Lady

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.

I really have enjoyed the author's Maisie Dobbs series, and not just because she has the same last name as I do!

However, this foray into a new series just wasn't clicking for me. I found the main character kind of boring and the story not that exciting either and ended up, stopping about a third of the way through.

4.5/5 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.