Biography
Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of southern California, she attended Boston University where she earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Classical Voice.
She has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga, and two books in the Italian Renaissance, before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Diamond Eye.
All have been translated into multiple languages. Kate and her husband now live in San Diego with three rescue dogs.
Publications
Empress of Rome Book Series
Mistress of Rome, (2010)
Daughters of Rome, (2011)
Empress of the Seven Hills / Empress of Rome, (2012)
The Three Fates, (2015)
Lady of the Eternal City, (2015)
Borgia Chronicles
The Serpent and the Pearl, (2013)
The Lion and the Rose, (2014)
Standalone Novels
The Alice Network, (2017)
In the aftermath of World War II, Charlie St. Clair is pregnant and unmarried. When her parents banish her to Europe so she can terminate her pregnancy, Charlie instead heads to London to find out what happened to her cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war.
A year into World War I, Eve Gardiner is recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she is trained by Lili, who manages a vast network of secret agents.
Thirty years later, Eve is still haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network. But then a young American barges into her crumbling London house and utters a name she hasn't heard in decades, launching them both on a mission to find the truth, no matter where it leads.
Standalone Novels
The Huntress, (2019)
When the Nazis attack the Soviet Union, Nina Markova risks everything to join the legendary Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment. When she is stranded behind enemy lines, Nina becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress.
Transformed by the horrors he witnessed, British war correspondent Ian Graham has become a Nazi hunter. Yet one target eludes him: a vicious predator known as the Huntress.
To find her, the fierce, disciplined investigator joins forces with the only witness to escape the Huntress alive: the brazen, cocksure Nina. But a shared secret could derail their mission unless Ian and Nina force themselves to confront it.
Standalone Novels
The Diamond Eye, (2022)
After Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Mila Pavlichenko must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper --- a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her 300th kill makes her a national heroine, Mila is sent to America on a goodwill tour. She finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC --- until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness.
But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.
Standalone Novels
The Rose Code, (2021)
Latest check, 4.7 rating on Amazon, with over 23,500 reviews
Note: British reviewers liked the book but objected to the language, said she needed a British editor.
A Year of Ravens, (2015)
A Song of War (2016)
Cast of characters—Osla Kendall
One of the novel’s three protagonists, Osla is a dark haired debutante loosely based on Osla Benning who dated Prince Philip before he married Elizabeth; she finagled her way back to England from Canada and built fighter planes at Hawker Siddeley before joining BP.
Her father is dead and her mother is an often re-married socialite who keeps a suite at Claridge's hotel but has little time for her daughter. She's something of a fun-loving free spirit, often in the gossip columns, but who wants to be taken seriously. When she arrives at Bletchley, she's originally assigned clerical duties but wins a position as a German translator when she makes her case to her Hut supervisor, a woman.
She has a wry sense of humor and a gift for satirical prose which she puts to good use writing the Bletchley Bletherings (BB), the camp's gossip column. After the war, she writes for The Tatler.
Cast of characters—Osla Kendall
She's used to taking the initiative and transforms Beth, arranges Mab's wedding, argues that there's a security breach among the code-breakers, and persuades Mab to help her rescue Beth.
Throughout the novel, she searches for "a home," and imagines for a while that Philip might be that base.
She persistently rails against her persona as a silly socialite. By the end of the novel, when she can look back on her accomplishments, she realizes that she “had proved herself to everyone who mattered.”
By the end of the novel, she finds J. P. E. C. Cornwell, the man who gave her his coat when the Café de Paris was bombed.
Cast of characters—Mab (Mabel) Churt
She is the tall (5' 11") "Amazon" from the lower-class neighborhood of Shoreditch determined to rise above her origins by studying upper-class women, their fashion, their "rounded" vowels, their mannerisms, their education, including the 100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady.
In her teens, she fell for Geoffrey Irving, a university man, and got pregnant with Lucy whom her mother agreed to raise as her own daughter and Mab's sister.
When she marries Francis Gray, he's figured out that Lucy is Mab's daughter, rather than her sister, and agrees to raise her as his own. He buys her riding boots and agrees to buy her a pony just before the two of them are killed in Coventry.
Mab is a no-nonsense, hand-working practical woman determined not to live her mother's life. After Francis dies, she marries Mike Sharpe, a tall Australian former RAF pilot and engineer, whom she discovers had also worked at BP although the two never met.
Cast of characters—Beth (Bethan) Finch
Beth is the "mother's little helper" victim of her domineering mother, Mrs. Finch, who provides lodging for the BP women. Beth is initially shy, withdrawn, insecure, and fearful because throughout her life she's been told that she's not good at anything.
But she reads books and completes crossword puzzles in record time, a skill that at Bletchley makes her one of their best code-breakers. As one of "Dilly's Fillies," she meets Harry Zarb and falls in love with him, although he's married with a child incapacitated by polio.
Her skills at Bletchley (the Abwehr code) give her the confidence to confront her mother, who has tossed out her dog Boots, and leave the house, with Osla and Mab.
She's falsely incarcerated at Clockwell Sanitarium, as Alice Liddell, when she unwittingly finds evidence of a BP traitor. She's freed by Mab and Osla, uncovers the traitor, and re-unites with Harry.
Cast of characters—Francis Gray
Poet who falsified his age to join the army during WWI and became famous for describing the desolation of trench warfare when only in his teens.
Although not at BP, he is in the Intelligence Service, and accompanies Winston Churchill.
He's quiet and reserved, possibly suffering from PTSD, uncommunicative to Mab, except in writing, but he asks her to marry him after only 3 dates She accepts, although he's often absent during their marriage.
They met when he almost ran into Mab and Osla walking home from BP. Mab changed his tire, cussed him out, and he replaced her broken shoes.
Cast of characters—Harry Zarb
Harry is based on two real-life Bletchley Park codebreakers: Maurice Zarb, a Hut 4 recruit of Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian descent who came to BP via a prominent London banking family and Keith Batey, a brilliant Hut 6 mathematician who worked with Mavis Lever, fell in love with her over the rods and cribs, and married her.
Like many male cryptanalysts, Harry was shamed for not being on the front lines, especially as a man of considerable size, but they could not of course divulge the real war work they were doing.
He is married to Sheila, for the sake of their son Christopher, who contracted polio at 18 months and wears leg braces.
He and Beth develop a relationship.
Cast of characters—Dilly Knox
Dilwyn is a code-breaking veteran of World War I, now managing a team of women, "Dilly's fillies," at Bletchley Park. He has an Alice in Wonderland style of management, encourages the women to think "outside the box," apply a different perspective, and asks Beth which way the clock turns if she's inside it.
He continually looks for his glasses (on his head) or his tobacco and chooses women for his team rather than men because "men bring egos into it. They compete, they show off, they don’t even try to do it my way before they’re telling me how to do it better."
Women "are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, . . . They listen. That’s why I like fillies instead of colts, m’dear, not because I’m building a harem."
Cast of characters—Dilly Knox
He lives at Courns Wood with wife Olive, suffering from cancer and working on Soviet ciphers, but dies before the war is over. Olive gives the codes he's been working on to Rose, who solves the Rose Code.
He also introduces Beth to Vigenere squares, a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It employs a form of polyalphabetic substitution, first described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553.
Cast of characters—Giles Talbot
He's Osla's fiancée and the BP traitor who has been giving information to the Soviets that as war-time Allies he thought they should have. He's also being paid for this info.
When Beth discovers the Rose Code, cyphers that Dilly had been working on, Giles, with Commander Travis, arranges to have her placed in the Clockwell Sanitarium, awaiting a lobotomy.
He visits her and says he'll free her (the day before the scheduled lobotomy) if she gives him all the incriminating evidence; she refuses.
But Mab and Osla free her and with Harry and others they de-code the messages that are evidence against Giles and he's ultimately caught.
Osla also finds out that Giles is selling info about her and the "royals" to the tabloids. At the end of the novel, she gives Beth his emerald engagement ring to sell.
Cast of characters
John Cornwell—Osla's rescuer when the Café de Paris is bombed. He gives her his coat, which she keeps because she likes wearing it, until she's arrested and he is summoned as purportedly her husband. She's has written to him multiple times, to say "thank you," but never received a reply.
Margaret (Peggy) Rock, Beth's supervisor whom she originally thinks may have been the traitor. But she's not, and helps the group solve the Rose Code at the end of the novel, by securing an Enigma machine and bombe. She even offers Beth a job in the intelligence service now that she's with GCHQ.
Interviews and Videos
Bletchley Park demo of the Bombe (from an original bombe operator)
Questions for discussion
This novel has an interesting structure, although one we've seen before. It alternates between sections that read:
Eight Years Ago (Dec. 1939),
Seven Years Ago (June, 1940),
Six Years Ago (March 1941), and so on
AND
Twelve Days until the Royal Wedding, (Nov. 8, 1947)
Eleven Days until the Royal Wedding,
Ten days, nine days, and so on until
Five Days Before the Royal Wedding, which is Nov. 15, 1947
Why is the novel structured around these two timelines?
Questions for discussion
In some books, the setting is so integral to the development of the novel that it in fact could be considered a character; for example, the Australian outback in Salt Creek, Cold Mountain, in that novel, and of course others.
So, is Bletchley Park a character in this novel?
Questions for discussion
There are several symbols in this novel, most notably clocks and roses; hence the title. What do these symbols represent?
Breakout Room Question
After the tragic deaths of Francis Gray and Lucy during the Coventry bombing, Mab initially blames Osla from not holding on to Lucy. But they then find out that Beth knew from her decoding about the raid on the city.
And we know that the issue is still unresolved whether Churchill received the message in time, or not. According to the book The Ultra Secret (1974), Churchill knew 4 or 5 hours before the attack, did warn emergency services (police/fire) but didn't evacuate the population. Thanks Bill Sperati for this info!
Beth didn't tell Mab because of her Oath of Secrecy. Was she right or wrong?
Breakout Room Question
What's your final take-away from this novel?
Questions for discussion
What is Kate Quinn particularly good at in her novels—plot, character development, themes, dialogue, etc.?
What will you remember from this novel? What do you remember from any other Quinn novels you've read, like The Alice Network or The Huntress.