The Huntress: A Novel

Review 5 stars From this novel’s opening with the Huntress deciding to move into the shadows, I was engrossed in the story, the characters, settings, the history and Kate Quinn’s writing. I was in awe of the writing throughout and discovered another wonderful author to follow. I could see everything unfold as we were introduced to the main players. The novel is told through the senses of three POVs – if you don’t count that brief tempting glimpse into the head of the Huntress in the Prologue. First, seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride who’s determined to become a photographer post-WWII and is inspired by the likes of Margaret Bourke-White – one of my heroines. She is pleased when her widowed father, who owns a Boston antiques shop, forms a relationship with Austrian widow Annelise Weber – but she is also suspicious. Suspicions that are heightened and dismissed or disproved but stirred up again. Then, in 1950s West Germany, the reader meets British war correspondent Ian Graham who has become a Nazi hunter, aided by Tony Rodomovky, a ‘Yank’ with Polish-Hungarian blood. But other people want to move on from focusing on Nazi crimes, especially the judges – the focus has shifted onto the ‘Commies’. However, for Ian, finding the elusive Huntress is personal – a reveal not rushed by the author. Finally, we are in harsh and remote Siberia, where my favourite character, Nina Markova needs to escape her father. Facing tough prospects if she remains, she risks everything to join the…

** WARNING SPOILERS** When you're a seventeen-year-old girl, your mother is dead, and your father brings home a new lady, your world can suddenly be unbalanced. "Who is she, Dad? " begins Kate Quinn's - and that question takes most of the book to answer on all different levels. Jordan McBride, a the teenage photographer into whose life Anna intrudes is a primary POV character, and the eyes through whom we see the United States portion of the story unfold. The new woman, Anneliese Weber aka Anna McBride is a complex character so expert at acting and deception that one wonders if she even knows the answer herself. On one level, cold and calculating, and on another sentimental. For me, it was obvious from the first two pages that she was Die Jagerin, The Huntress. This wasn't a mystery, but rather an unfolding. Quinn does a masterful job of moving back and forth in time between her present-day of the 1950s and the wartime. The backstory is given in flashback chapters that slowly unravel the puzzle of what happened - the prolog points to the murder of six Jewish children by a woman. She fed them, then she shot them. Another major POV character is Nina Borisovna Markova, a waif born to an alcoholic abuser in the wilds of Siberia, who becomes one of the Nachthexen, the Night Witches of the Soviet air force, bedeviling the Nazis. If you're unfamiliar with the Night Witches, it is worth reading up on them, but Quinn makes them come to life in a way you're unlikely to forget. Nina…