The Alice Network — Kate Quinn

At the end of the sec­ond world war, Charlie — a young aim­less woman, arrives in Europe with her moth­er and the need to sort out a Little Problem. She also has cousin miss­ing in WWII France and a name and address in London that might point her in the right direc­tion. Charlie bolts from her mother’s care­ful­ly planned solu­tions to her prob­lems and begins an odyssey that leads from London to var­i­ous cor­ners of France in the com­pa­ny Eve, of an eccen­tric for­mer spy, and her ex-con major­do­mo. The Alice Network is an adven­ture that explores the nature of hero­ism and duplic­i­ty. Beginning with a ring of female spies in WWI and the results of betray­als that car­ry over into WWII. This is the sto­ry of the search for the man respon­si­ble for Charlie’s loss of her cousin and Eve’s loss of, well just about everything.
There is a moment in the mid­dle the book where you have got­ten some bad news and the author is fore­shad­ow­ing some pret­ty grue­some scenes so hard that you can bare­ly see the sun­light for the shad­ows. At that moment you might just want to stop. I almost did. It had the feel­ing of an end­ing, an unhap­py end­ing but still an end­ing. I per­sist­ed and enjoyed the rest of the book — except for the grue­some scene that I knew was com­ing. (I don’t do tor­ture scenes well. Especially not any­thing involv­ing hands.) Still
Note that the WWI spy net­work, The Alice Network of the title, is based on his­tor­i­cal fact and sev­er­al of the sec­ondary char­ac­ters are real. It’s an inter­est­ing look into a bit of his­to­ry that isn’t often men­tioned when study­ing The Great War.

(pub. 2017)

* a tidy pack­age of his­to­ry and love story *