Kate Quinn’s “Alice Network” is a gripping thriller about female spies during the First World War.
1947. Charley St. Clair, expelled by her family from her native America for a transgression bordering on a crime against decency, arrives in Europe hoping to find her cousin who vanished in France during the German occupation of the 1940s.
1915. Young Evа Gardiner is desperate to fight the Germans, and unexpectedly she gets such a chance. The intelligence service offers Eva to become an agent in French territory occupied by the Boche. Her handler will be the famous Alice, the Queen of Spies, running an intelligence network right under the Germans’ noses.
Many years later, crushed by the weight of guilt for betrayal that destroyed the Alice Network, Eva spends her days in a half-ruined London house, trying to drown despair and pain in alcohol. But one day, an unfamiliar girl disrupts her solitude and speaks the name Eva hasn’t heard in years. And from that minute, the former spy and former student begin a search that will take them too far.
The novel is based on the true story of the famous Alice Network—the most effective intelligence organization operating in France during the First World War.