A Traitor in Whitehall is a delightful debut novel in Julia Kelley’s “Parisian Orphan” mystery/spy series. Evelyne Redfern is recognizable to many because her father, a famous titled adventurer/ne’er-do-well and mother, a French woman who was a bit of a femme fatale, had a huge public custody dispute over Evelyne that was in all the papers. Each accused the other of scandalous behavior and her mother got the worst of it. She died when Evelyne was 13 and her father promptly put Evelyne in boarding school and under the care of her Aunt Amelia over holidays. Now, she is in her 20s and working in a munitions factory. England is at war but London has not yet been bombed. Evelyn rooms with her best friend from boarding school in a rooming house for young women. With her university education and her stint as a copywriter in an ad agency, she is bored in her current war job.
Then, Evelyne runs across an old family friend, Mr. Fletcher. He offers to secure her a position in a typing pool for the Cabinet War Rooms, deep underground 3 days on/2 off. It would be a change. She never did use her secretarial training that she completed after university. All Mr. Fletcher asked her to do, in addition, was to monitor the environment/people for unusual things and report to him. While she began her observations and tried to figure out what Mr. Fletcher, might want to know about, she finds one of her coworkers in a room she was sent to – dead with a knife in her throat. Evelyne is a British detective novel aficionado with a lot of raw talent. She finds her way into the double investigation of the murder and the search for a mole who is leaking classified information.
Kelly is a charming writer, painting a great picture of the settings, i.e., the rooming house, the underground bunker where Evelyne works, her evening at the Ritz, the change when the blitz begins, shortly after she starts her job. We know enough about the players to enjoy the hunt and the suspects’ secrets. There were definitely some things I suspected, but it was not so obvious that I fully solved the crimes and it was an enjoyable read throughout. I really appreciated the accuracy of her research, including the phase of the war, the blitz period, what day to day life was like with ration books for food and no access to gasoline, the terrible losses emerging from the blitz etc. I was obvious by the way Kelly integrated all of these things into the story that she knows her subject and is not playing the game of throwing in a fact here and there to remind us this is a WWII book. I look forward to more Parisian Orphan novels.
They Called me Bookworm 