One Jump Short. The Della Marsh Notebook Series, #3

Pearl Witherington was the best shot British intelligence ever trained. They sent her into occupied France without a gun. She commanded three thousand five hundred resistance fighters, cut a German railway line eight hundred times in a month, and accepted the surrender of eighteen thousand Germans. After the war they denied her the Military Cross because she was a woman, and offered her a civilian medal she refused with an icy note.
What she wanted was her parachute wings - the specific recognition that her body had been in that aircraft, at nine hundred feet, over enemy territory. She waited sixty-three years. In 2007, Melbourne journalist Della Marsh sits across from Pearl Witherington Cornioley in the Loire Valley and asks the right questions. The third book in The Della Marsh Witness Series. A novel.