The Girl from the Corner Shop
This sweet historical romance is set in wartime Manchester. Newlywed Helen Harrison’s firefighter husband Jim has been killed during a bombing raid’s aftermath. She’s at a loss over how to support herself; she can’t bear to go back to her mother’s corner shop. Her godmother Pearl works in the fashion industry and hires Helen to work temporarily as a model. A theft of goods brings Helen into contact with the police, and she is persuaded to join the Women’s Auxiliary Police Corps (WAPC), a unit of women employed to help police with office work and as aides in cases involving women and children.
Helen enjoys being able to help bombed-out women and children in rest centers, where she meets handsome doctor Laurence. Working undercover to expose a medium conducting phony séances takes Helen aback when the medium claims to have contacted Jim. Her biggest challenge comes when she poses as a hostess at a shady nightclub, to help catch black marketeers.
This is a home front story; the war is mostly offstage while the characters cope with rationing and blackouts. Helen deals with prostitutes in her work, and Pearl is her boss’s mistress, but the story relegates sex to offstage as well. One plot thread peters out: Helen gets involved in a case of women being murdered in shelters, but then it’s later resolved without her participation. That might happen in real-life police work, but it was a bit of a disappointment here. Yet I appreciated learning about the WAPC and empathized with Helen as she worked through her grief over Jim and comes to acknowledge her feelings for Laurence.
Readers who want a break from novels which jump around in time or have multiple character viewpoints will welcome this straightforward romance.
