The Huntress by Kate Quinn

December 7, 2019

The Huntress by Kate Quinn

Boston, April 1946 – Dan McBride owns an antique shop in Boston, and one day, a pretty Austrian widow named Annelise Weber comes in to sell some of her jewelry.  They are attracted to each other and marry after a brief courtship.  Dan’s 17 year old daughter Jordan is initially happy that her lonely father has found love again since he has been a widower for ten years.  But there is something about her new stepmother that bothers Jordan, and she sets out to discover the new Mrs. McBride's past.

Vienna, April 1950 – former war correspondent Ian Graham has dedicated his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals who have escaped prosecution, but the Nazi he wants to capture the most is Die Jagerin (The Huntress).  He teams up with Nina Markova, a Russian pilot who was a member of the Night Witches, a famous squadron of female pilots.  Nina barely escaped from Die Jagerin with her life and will stop at nothing to hunt her down, even if the search takes her to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Kate Quinn writes about little-known historical events, especially about women.  I loved her previous book, The Alice Network, which covered another little-known World War II story about a network of female spies, but this one was disappointing. The Huntress is told from three points of view:  Jordan, Ian, and Nina.  Nina’s sections about being a Night Witch were fascinating.  This is a really long book that could have been considerably shorter – there is a lot of filler, conversations and love scenes that don’t help move the story forward, especially in Jordan’s sections (the plot almost didn’t need Jordan at all).  A good editor could have cut out 100-150 pages, making a better narrative.

(Why do so many authors feel that they have to write a love story or sexual relationship for every character?  Unless it has something to do with the plot, it's certainly not necessary in a work of historical fiction.  How does it improve the story to hear about Ian and Nina rolling around in bed all the way across the Atlantic?  I'm also sick of men tucking curls behind women's ears - does any guy do that in real life???  If I want romance, I'll read a romance.)

Historical note:  the Night Witches, as they were called by the Nazis, were the Russian 588^th Night Bomber Regiment made up entirely of women pilots in their late teens and early twenties.  Although the Russian military originally tried to recruit educated university women, they soon realized they needed tough peasant girls who were accustomed to hardship and bitterly cold weather.  Each airplane had a two-woman crew, a pilot and a navigator who was also the bombardier.  As they neared their targets, the pilot would cut the engines so that the German soldiers on the ground would not hear them approaching.  They would glide to the drop zone, and after dropping their payload, the plane would head back to their base, where the ground crew would quickly refuel the plane and reload it with bombs.  The same pilot and navigator would head out for another pass over the Germans, sometimes doing as many as ten bombing runs per night per plane.  The Night Witches were so feared that any German pilot who brought down one of their planes was immediately awarded the Iron Cross.  (Sources:  history.com and Wikipedia.)