THE HUNTRESS by Kate Quinn

It has been almost five years since the end of the Second Great War and those guilty of the most heinous, horrific war crimes (at least those caught alive) are publicly receiving verdicts for their atrocities.

But this is not enough for Ian Graham; he knows that these doomed people are just a handful of all those who started the destructive machinery of World War II. Many of them, after the war, almost continued to lead normal, peaceful lives, pretending that everything they did until yesterday and what they believed in until yesterday had nothing to do with them.

Justice is slow, and sometimes blind, so reaching out to the great criminals he completely neglects to hunt these others. And it was there, in that omission, that Ian Graham founded his life mission; they will seek and hunt down those who deserve to be punished, but are not and probably will not be. Not to take revenge on them, but to bring them to justice.

And despite years of intense searching, he can’t find her; a woman he has never seen, but whom he cannot forget. She took everything he cared about and Ian wouldn’t be able to stop until he caught the infamous Huntress.

In order to catch a woman, he has never seen, he will soon be helped by a woman he once married a long time ago, without ever kissing her. Both as if demons had emerged from the lake – magnificent and dangerous – and today, five years after the war, completely unrecognizable…

Hundreds of miles away from Ian, across the ocean, a widower and his almost grown-up daughter will fall in love with a beautiful, elegant woman whose history they know nothing about. Jordan is ready to love her; heaven knows that her father needs a wife, that he needs someone to love him and take care of him. Anneliese is perfect, and her daughter Ruth, Jordan’s future sister, is a cute little creature.

The problem is that what Jordan sees with her own eyes and what she sees and catches with her camera doesn’t match… Dad warned her not to ask too much and to curb her penchant for making up fantastic stories; people who survived the war need no reminder of its horrors. However, Jordan has no peace; in her small photography studio in the basement of the house grows a collection of Annelies ’photographs, and they tell a much different, darker, and more dangerous story than the one Annelies tells about herself. Will Jordan realize in time who the mysterious woman who lives in their house is and whose presence has beautified their lives in so many ways?

In late 2017, I picked up a book written by Kate Quinn for the first time. It was also a historical war novel, “The Alice Network,” which turned out to be one of the few books that led me to conclude that sleep was completely irrelevant until I finished it.

I staggered for two days from exhaustion, but I staggered enthusiastically, radiant, in love with the characters I had just read about, and distraught with the desire to find out when Kate Quinn’s next book would be out.

And then she announced “The Huntress.” And then I whimpered softly with impatience for months until I finally got hold of it, terrified that my expectations at that point had grown so much, that the book could only disappoint me. However, fortunately for me, but also for my misfortune, I had to stagger with fatigue again for two or three days after I inhaled the book and concluded that it was better for me than “The Alice Network”.

In both this and the previous book, we have people looking for someone; in the book “The Alice Network” a group of interesting characters (with them the unforgettable, wonderful Eve Gardiner) search for information about missing loved ones, but also revenge; in The Huntress, the characters’ search for the Huntress and justice.

In both the first and second books, Kate Quinn introduced us to a group of brave young women whose characters are based on real people; in “The Alice Network,” it’s a group of fearless, loyal spies; in “The Huntress” it is a group of war pilots who, despite the skepticism and ridicule of men and “real soldiers”, sowed fear in the bones of hostile German soldiers.

These brave women flew at night, in open two-seater aircraft. So that no one would hear them approaching through the clouds, they would turn off the engines of the planes above the German military ranks and in complete silence crash to altitudes of only a few hundred meters, drop bombs and then start the engines and fly back to base, for new explosives. For three years they lived (and died) at such a pace; they could have as many as 13 takeoffs in one night. The Germans called them “die Nachthexen”, the Night Witches.

I fell in love with Kate Quinn because she writes so beautifully, because her characters – especially female characters – are complex and interesting, never black and white. But the reason I will remain loyal to her for as long as she writes is that for each of her books she draws evidence from the oblivion of world history that women have always, in hundreds of ways, actively participated in changing and creating the world as we know it today and were and still are capable like any man.

Such women deserve someone like Kate Quinn to write their stories and remind us of their lives, and our job is to remember them, to learn from their life stories and, by talking about them, to expand the circle of women who admire them and their stories are inspire and encourage.

So I have no choice but to recommend “The Huntress” from the bottom of my heart; you will see that you will soon become like Ian Graham – you will not be able to stop thinking about women you have never seen. Also if you haven’t read “The Alice Network” too.