I read this on the recommendation of Caitlin_D (Cannonballer Says!) after we both thoroughly enjoyed Quinn’s first novel, The Alice Network. If I remember correctly, Caitlin simultaneously got the audio book and the hard copy from the library, started the audio book and told me to read her copy of the hardback so I could get to it sooner. She’s an American hero.
The Huntress flips back and forth between two narratives. During WWII, Nina Markova escapes her violent father and a village in Soviet Russia to fly planes and drop bombs on Hitler’s eastern front as a Night Witch. She crosses paths with a Nazi know as the Huntress, a brutal killer stalking the countryside. Then, in the years immediately following WWII, Nina joins up with British war correspondent Ian Graham to hunt the same woman. Meanwhile, in Boston, teenage girl Jordan McBride begins to suspect that her father’s new German girlfriend is hiding something.
I loved two things about this book (I loved more than that but two things specifically). One: Nina is a goddamn bad-ass. The regiment she joins actually existed — the “Night Witches” had Germans shaking in fear as they dropped bombs in the middle of the night and disappeared without a trace. I actually saw them referenced on Reddit recently as one of those awesome women from history that no one has ever heard of, and I was like, But I have! Two: while this book has a lot of twists and turns, the “bad guy” gets revealed very early. So rather than remaining in the darkness with the main characters as they figured things out, the reader knows the basic truth and has to sit quietly while the characters stumble around following clues. Since one of those characters is a teenage girl trying to sniff out a Nazi killer — it was very stressful and I loved it.