Review: The White Lady

The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Miss Elinor (Linni) White (actually De Witt) is a half-Belgian/ half-British woman living in a small Kent village in a 'Grace and Favour' cottage. She keeps herself to herself and is known locally as the White Lady. Little do her neighbours know that she served in the Belgian resistance in World War I whilst only a teenager and was a member of SOE in World War II. Despite the war being over, Elinor still keeps looking over her shoulder, obsessing over being watched and having multiple entries/exits to her home.

One day Elinor's peace is shattered when the young couple with a small child who have moved into the village from London are visited by the husband's brothers. He is the son and grandson of scions of a notorious South London crime family, the Mackies, and his family want him to do another job for them. Elinor is enraged that these men could hurt a woman and child and decides to interfere, getting in contact with her former SOE colleague and lover who is now a senior detective in Scotland Yard.

Told in flashbacks to World War I and World War II from Linni's 'present day' of 1947, this is a meticulously researched historical novel, as I have come to expect from Jacqueline Winspear. However, the risk with a novel spanning three time periods is that the focus is unclear, they are like pen and ink sketches, lacking the finer details and this is how I felt about this novel. So for example we saw a lot of detail about petrol rationing and cups of tea, but lightly skimming over Elinor's SOE experience.

Also, I could see where this was going from quite early on but it relied upon someone explaining the whole thing to Elinor, who just happened, by coincidence, to link the two stories together - a deus ex machina if you will.

I was going to write a puzzled comment about how this is the third book I have read about Belgium in WW1 in less than a year and went to remind myself of the facts and I see that one of the other two books was also written by Jacqueline Winspear In This Grave Hour and featured the Belgian resistance group known as La Dame Blanche, did she find the research so fascinating that she felt compelled to use it in another book?

Overall, I loved the writing (as always), but I felt it lacked a bit of edge, the ending was closer to a cosy mystery with everything neatly tied into a bow than I am used to with Jacqueline Winspear.

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews