‘The Alice Network’ Is A Crackling Tale Of Spies And Suspense

The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Paperback, 528 pages | purchase

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“ Solve for ten. ” That ‘s the phrase invoked repeatedly by Charlotte “ Charlie ” St. Clair, the brainy college scholar at the plaza of Kate Quinn ‘s exciting new fresh, The Alice Network. In the consequence of World War II, Charlie is thrown together with a veteran female spy from the previous war in a high-stakes travel to locate vanish figures from the past. Unsolved puzzles and cabalistic riddles crop up like weeds in a bomb calorimeter volcanic crater, and as math-whiz Charlie puts it, “ There was always an answer and the answer was either mighty or it was ill-timed. ” But her adventures turn out to be messy, non-formulaic and not so total darkness and white, which after all is what makes biography — and novels — interesting. The year is 1947. Charlie ‘s classy Bennington College universe gets derailed by an undesirable pregnancy. Her domineering french mother hauls her off to Europe, heading for a clinic that will take care of her “ little Problem, ” as she calls her condition throughout the fresh. En road, Charlie hatches an option plan — to track down her beloved cousin Rose, lost somewhere in France. In Europe, the “ holdover of war was even visible in a way you did n’t see in New York. ” Rose is a refugee amid a horde of displace persons, a single granulate of sand on a blasted, closely obscure beach, but Charlie is determined to “ solve for ten ” and find her .

Enter Eve Gardiner, a rag, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed WWI espionage agent who fair might possess a clue to Rose ‘s whereabouts. When Charlie first comes into her room, Eve cocks a Luger pistol and demands, “ Who are you, and what the bloody degree fahrenheit — – are you doing in my house ? ” In alternating chapters with alternating earth wars as backdrops, we follow Eve ‘s exploits in 1915 in “ the Alice Network, ” a historically accurate conspiracy of spies. Shedding the overbearing chaperon of a mother, Charlie and Eve set off to find Rose in a real beauty of a car, a dark-blue convertible Aston Martin Lagonda. Cherchez l’homme : Serving as their driver is a charming but war-stunned Scotsman, Finn, master of the “ one-pan breakfast. ” In romances and historic novels alike, the word “ disheveled ” is a tell-tale form, and it surely works that way here : “ Finn ‘s tousle dark head leaned out the window, and I saw the ember luminescence of his cigarette, ” Charlie says at one point. Equipped with Eve ‘s ever-ready Luger, the audacious three travel through Lille, Limoge and Grasse, vielle French towns that Quinn renders in dainty contingent. Charlie sponsors the journey by pawning a valued rope of pearls inherited from her grandmere. In ‘The Alice Network, ‘ the lives of two indomitable women intertwine in a plot crackling with suspense .
Both women experience transformations, Charlie by dumping her New Look fully skirts and petticoats for slender black slacks and a Euro-chic strip perspirer, Eve by learning to treat her traveling companions with a modicum of deference. Charlie ‘s arrogance does n’t change — “ there was n’t a bill anywhere I could n’t tot up faster than an adding machine ” — but she lets her guard down adequate to find kinship with both Finn and Eve. And at the kernel of Quinn ‘s cogent is the true history of the covert Alice Network, through which brave men and women infiltrated the german lines in rural France. Lili, in the novel the chief handler of the group, is based on a real charwoman who at the time was called a “ regular Joan of Arc. ” With dozens of operatives under her command, Lili asserts that the Germans will never be able to find her : “ I ‘m a handful of water, running everywhere. ”

Despite this sword of brave assurance, displayed by all the women in the fib, Quinn ‘s novel gives us tragedies, excessively, both from war and from pursuing the ghosts and demons of the past. But these pains are offset by the inspire pleasure of the read. In The Alice Network, the lives of two indomitable women intertwine in a plot crackling with suspense. We root for Charlie and Eve, and cheer when they triumph .

Jean Zimmerman ‘s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin .