Author review: Kate Quinn

I’ve been enjoying Kate Quinn’s books. I started with The Alice Network, which I found in our Libby audiobook collection, but we also have it as an e-Book and a print book.

Ms Quinn’s earlier works are about Rome. She has a series The Empress of Rome which I haven’t read. In her later novels she writes about women in wartime – women in dangerous situations, putting their lives on the line for their country. Her works fiction loosely based on fact.

The Alice Network was an actual spy ring, run by the Queen of Spies, Louise de Bettignies in France during WWI. Quinn’s Alice Network takes Eve, a spy from that network and teams her up with Charlie, a young American socialite searching for her cousin who went missing during WWII. The story switches between the current setting of 1947 and Eve’s WWI experiences. It tells of the knife edge on which the spies balanced and savage treatment of those exposed. It adds a little romance to help the medicine go down.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the narrator on the audio book is great.

The same narrator reads for all of Quinn’s books, so her voice becomes quite familiar. I am now on my third, The Huntress having listened to The Rose Code.

The Rose Code tells a story of the women of Bletchley Park, the famous home of Britain’s WWII codebreakers. Three women from completely different backgrounds give us a wider view of wartime Britain. But it is after the war that things come to a head and the women reunite in the hunt for a traitor who they’d thought was one of their own.

The Huntress is a Nazi war criminal. A murderous woman determined to hide her past. She is in turn hunted by a tiny group of three who want to see her brought to justice. It follows a female Russian pilot, a member of the Red Army’s legendary Night Witches….. I am still in the middle of this, so that’s all I can say for now!

If you like a good war story…

If you like stories about fearless women in tough situations…

If you like to experience all this from the safety of your armchair…

I recommend some Kate Quinn

By Peggy McConnell

Kate Quinn