I’m spending some time this month going over the books I read in 2019 and thinking about whether I ought to fix the fact that I never wrote out a proper review for them. (If you looked at my post 2019 in Books: The Full Rundown, you’ll get a picture of everything that I read this year.)
A fair number of those books were read for book club (better known as the CH Armchair Detective Society). The purpose of this book club was mostly for work – better team bonding, but doing so in the “Spirit of Place” – thus we decided upon mystery novels set in the early part of the 20th century. (In this frame, we decided everything from 1910 to 1949 was appropriate.) So far we’ve read seven books: The Alice Network, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder at the Vicarage, Maisie Dobbs, and The Thin Man. (Yes, three of them so far have been by Agatha Christie.)
Of these books, I’ve enjoyed The Alice Network and Maisie Dobbs the most. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is the most recent of these books, having been released in 2017. Interestingly, going into reading this book, we had just determined that we were not (as a group) typically fans of jumping around in timelines. Then we chose a book to read that did just that.
However, the wonderful things about The Alice Network is that the story – even in two simultaneous story lines – worked very well. The timing and the way the two stories fit together actually made these leaps in time work. The way Eve and Charlie’s stories paralleled each other, and Rose’s story as well, everything just clicked. And pretty much everyone in our group agreed.
Kate Quinn also released another book this past year: The Huntress. This one is also based on World War II, and sounds just as remarkable. Kate Quinn handled two story lines well, and The Huntress attempts three. I’m intrigued to see if she handles it as beautifully as she did with The Alice Network.