Elena Standish

About the Elena Standish series

Anne Perry's last completed series follows Elena Standish, a photographer working in 1930s Europe and the granddaughter of a former British intelligence officer, as she's drawn out of her professional life and into espionage work while fascism rises across the continent. Beginning in Venice in 1933 in Death in Focus, the series moves through the decade's escalating political tensions -- Nazi Germany's growing reach, the machinery of European intelligence services, and the personal cost of operating inside both -- with Elena's camera work giving her a plausible reason to be places she shouldn't, and a habit of noticing details that get her, and the people she cares about, into danger.

It was Perry's final series, running from 2019 until her death in 2023, and shifts her usual Victorian setting forward by roughly seventy years into the interwar period -- trading drawing-room murder for the slower, more paranoid tension of watching a continent slide toward a second world war.

How to read this series

Read the five books in publication order -- Death in Focus, A Question of Betrayal, A Darker Reality, A Truth to Lie For and The Traitor Among Us -- as Elena's espionage work and her relationships (particularly with her grandfather and her intelligence-service contacts) build across the series. No familiarity with Perry's other series is required; this is a self-contained story set in a different era from her Victorian mysteries.