Review: The Huntress

The Huntress by Kate Quinn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The Living Forget. The Dead Remember."

I snapped up this book for review because one of the central characters is drawn from the real life "Night Witches," the all-female regiment of ace night-bombing pilots mounted by the Soviet Union during World War II. These brave women have long fascinated me and most people have never even heard of them. Flying the Polikarpov Po-2 (U-2), an open cockpit cloth and wood biplane, which was slow and flammable, these women flew with no radio, no brakes and most harrowingly, no parachutes, on as many as eighteen bombing runs a night, often cutting their engines to effect a silent approach, waging not just a bomb campaign on the Germans but psychological warfare, as the whistling wind of their approaching planes on their repeated runs in the dark of night left the soldiers facing their bombing raids in fear and continual unease at the sound of the wind.

Nina Markov is a mysterious woman when Ian Graham meets her in 1945 and mistakenly thinks she is Polish. Ian is looking for his brother Sebastian, an escaped POW and Nina knows what happened to him on a dock on Lake Rusalka. The truth about what happened that fated night in November 1944 is hard for both to bear and it forms the raison d'être of this novel- the search for a woman known initially to the reader as The Huntress, a Nazi war criminal. Ian and Nina reunite in 1950 to follow up on a new lead about the mysterious Lorelei Vogt, a cold and cruel young woman who was reported to have invited six starving Jewish children who she found hiding on the shore of Lake Rusalka in Altausee Austria, into her home for a warm meal then leading them outside to her dock and shooting them and dumping them into the lake. For this vile act, and other crimes that come to light as the book develops, she has gained the name die Jägerin- the Huntress. Joined by a Nazi hunting lawyer, Tony Rodomovksy, Nina, Ian and Tony follow the Huntress's trail to the US, a place where a disturbing number of Nazi war criminals were living in hiding (actual fact and the US didn't much care about them). There, in Boston, they meet a young woman named Jordan, a photographer with keys to the puzzle of Lorelei Vogt.

A powerful novel about seeking justice, about never forgetting the truth of those who committed grave wrongs. I loved the complexity of the characters, one of whom is bisexual, another of whom is horrified to find she loves a murderess, feeling and admixture of loss, sorrow and revulsion. The juxtaposed fierceness of Nina and Lorelei make for fascinating reading. The women in this book are marvelously rendered and the men who work with them allow them their power, which is always refreshing.

This is an excellent novel of historical fiction, well-paced and hard to put down.

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from William Morrow via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review, along with a paper copy of the book.

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