{"id":8712,"date":"2020-12-08T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8712"},"modified":"2020-12-07T21:43:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T02:43:06","slug":"the-huntress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8712","title":{"rendered":"The Huntress"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Kate Quinn\u2019s 2019 thriller is a real page-turner\u2014good thing too because there are a lot of pages. Soon after World War II, widowed Boston antiques dealer Daniel McBride meets Austrian refugee Annaliese Weber and falls for her. She has a four-year-old daughter and a bit of a murky past whose pieces don\u2019t quite fit. Daniel is in love and oblivious, but his teenage daughter Jordan is not. In the chapters where she\u2019s the center, you feel her love for her father, as she tries to reconcile her stepmother\u2019s affectionate behavior and her doubts about the woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over in Europe, two Nazi-hunters\u2014a sophisticated Englishman and a Polish-Hungarian former GI\u2014have teamed up to track down war criminals overlooked by the Nuremberg trials. Ian, the erudite Englishman, received a solid education, but it\u2019s Tony, from polyglot Queens, who \u201ccould talk to anyone, usually in their native language.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1950, they have a good track record, despite the shoestring nature of their operation. A woman they would really like to find is die J\u00e4gerin<\/em>, The Huntress. She had been the mistress of a high-ranking SS officer, now dead. During the war, she murdered numerous people, including six refugee children, and one of her victims was Ian\u2019s brother Sebastian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian first heard about Seb\u2019s death from a young woman, \u201call starved eyes and grief,\u201d whom he encountered in a Polish hospital. Nina Borisovna Markova is the third leg of this sturdy triangle of point-of-view characters\u2014Jordan, Ian, and Nina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nina grew up in a tiny village in Siberia\u2014the youngest of several children, with no mother, siblings who fled, and a violent alcoholic father\u2014dreaming of escape, but where and to what? The answer comes the day she sees her first airplane. She heads west to a city where she learns to fly, becoming a member of the first Soviet women\u2019s flying squad, and active in bombing the German invaders. It\u2019s a perfect life for her until her father\u2019s drunken denunciations of Stalin reach the wrong ears. Unless she escapes the Soviet Union, she\u2019s likely to be rounded up and imprisoned too. The Siberian legends and superstitions of Nina\u2019s childhood are woven into all these experiences, and the result is a complex, prickly, utterly unique personality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quinn\u2019s characters are passionate about their concerns, though Nina\u2019s passions are at best only half-tamed. Because die J\u00e4gerin<\/em> tried to kill Nina, she wants to find the woman just as much as Ian does. And, she knows what die J\u00e4gerin<\/em> looks like. When Tony stumbles on a faint clue that leads them to Boston, they hope to pick up the murderer\u2019s scent. They have no idea she\u2019s living as a respectable housewife right under their noses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sum up this story in a single word, it would be \u201csatisfying.\u201d All Quinn\u2019s characters and their concerns are compelling, and their rich experiences support the plot. There\u2019s more than a touch of romance, and the good-humored banter provided by Tony is an effective counterpoint to the seriousness of the hunters\u2019 quest. In short, I really enjoyed this book and recommend it highly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate Quinn\u2019s 2019 thriller is a real page-turner\u2014good thing too because there are a lot of pages. Soon after World War II, widowed Boston antiques dealer Daniel McBride meets Austrian refugee Annaliese Weber and falls for her. She has a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Huntress - Frankly, I liked everything about this book--plot, characters, and the quest of the Nazi-hunting heroes. But it's the women who make it a stand-out.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[440,1335,40,266,126,66],"tags":[1788,1789,446],"class_list":["post-8712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-amateur-detective","category-fiction","category-history","category-reading-2","category-suspense","tag-kate-quinn","tag-the-huntress","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2gw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8713,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8712\/revisions\/8713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}