Nina Markova joined the Soviet Union's all-female Night Witches bomber regiment to escape a violent childhood and finally fly. Shot down behind German lines, she is hunted by a Nazi officer known only as the Huntress. Nina is the only witness who ever got away from her alive.
Years later, British war correspondent Ian Graham is still chasing that same woman, one of the war criminals who slipped past the Nuremberg trials. His search leads him to Nina, and the two form an uneasy partnership. Each is holding back a piece of their own wartime past, and either secret could unravel the case.
In Boston, seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride would rather be behind her camera than at her father's engagement party. Small evasions from his new fiancee, about her years in Austria, start to bother her. Her father wants the wedding to happen. Jordan wants to know who this woman was before she arrived in America.
Kate Quinn moves between the Eastern Front, liberated Europe and postwar New England to bring the three threads together. The pace builds through interrogation, surveillance and family suspicion rather than combat. It is a dense, patiently plotted piece of World War II fiction, for readers who want the aftermath as much as the war itself.