Before long they form an unlikely alliance, heading to France with Eve’s Scottish hired help, Finn Kilgore, in his ageing Lagonda. Eve is set to turn Charlie out into the street, but a new lead sparks her curiosity. But Charlie needs to track down Rose before it’s too late and take control of her own life. That’s not the only problem for Charlie – she’s three month’s pregnant and was supposed to be going to a clinic for an abortion. Eve, working at a bureau that helped locate refugees, had corresponded with Charlie’s father about Rose giving no reason for hope. Without a death certificate or witness statement, she still hopes Rose is alive. Charlie is determined to track down a long lost French cousin, Rose, angry that no one has found out what happened to Rose in the recent war. It’s pouring with rain, and Charlie has escaped her mother during a visit to Europe for a completely different purpose. Clair, hammers on Eve’s door demanding to be let in.

It’s an evening in 1947 when nineteen-year-old New Yorker, Charlie St. We first meet Eve years later as an ageing drunk with deformed hands, a bad temper and a tendency to wave her Luger around, firing off a round when startled. But what about the earlier war? Kate Quinn puts us in the picture with one particular network run by Alice Dubois (real name Louise de Bettignies) in German occupied France during the First World War.Īlthough The Alice Network is partly written through the eyes of a fictitious character – Evelyn Gardiner, a British spy (code name Marguerite Le Francois) – Dubois and her network of spies are also incorporated into the story. It was a time for women getting to do some gutsy jobs, involving danger and cunning – not the usual ‘keep the home fires burning’ roles they were often accustomed to. There have been quite a few novels telling the story of World War II female British agents dropped into France, and their resistance fighter counterparts, and they often make good reading.

Quinn the alice network