The Alice Network

The Hunt for René Bordelon

In 1947, Charlie St. Clair, a young American, travels through postwar Europe with her mother, who plans to settle Charlie's unwanted pregnancy quietly at a clinic in Switzerland. Charlie has a different aim. She wants to find Rose, who disappeared in France during the war. She slips away from her mother, follows a lead to Eve Gardiner, and persuades her to help.

Eve is an abrasive, alcoholic former spy. Her hands shake, she is scarred by the war, and she wants nothing to do with her past. Charlie refuses to be dismissed. With Finn Kilgore, the gruff Scottish driver, the pair travel through a scarred France, toward Limoges, following the trail of Rose and of a man Eve hates, René Bordelon. Charlie slowly sees that Eve's drinking and bitterness come from something specific and terrible.

The story alternates with 1915. Captain Cameron recruits the young Eve, a typist with a stammer, because no one would suspect a stuttering girl of spying. She is trained to observe, memorize, lie and play a harmless part. Eve is ambitious and hates being underestimated, so she takes the danger as an escape. She is sent to occupied Lille, where she works at René Bordelon's restaurant, Le Lethe, and joins the network led by Lili, a charismatic and exacting leader.

René is a cultured collaborator who dines the German officers and profits from the occupation. Eve must charm him and hide her revulsion while memorizing what the officers let slip about troop movements and supplies. Her stammer, once a shame, becomes a shield, though it returns under stress. His interest in her grows possessive and dangerous. Eve learns to compartmentalize, and she measures herself against Lili. The work is grinding, and it costs her pieces of herself.

The past catches up with the present. Eve is captured and imprisoned at Siegburg. Her hands are damaged, and her hatred of René sustains her. She is haunted by Lili's fate and by guilt over what she did and failed to do. In 1947 she speaks of it to Charlie, who grows from a naive girl into a determined partner. They trace René, who has reinvented himself under a new identity, to Grasse. There they find him old, diminished and unrepentant, and they come face to face with him.

Epilogue and Author's Note

The epilogue brings the two stories to a hard-won resolution. Charlie is with Finn, and the shame and isolation that marked her search have given way to a steadier life of her own choosing. Eve receives recognition for her service in the Alice Network. René's crimes are exposed and he faces consequences, which lifts the burden his freedom had placed on her. Eve is calmer, her stammer eases, and she can think of Lili as someone who chose her own fate bravely.

Eve and Cameron, her former handler, are reunited. Their reconciliation is complicated and unromanticized. Two aged and scarred people acknowledge their shared history and their feeling for each other without pretending the wounds never existed. The final images show the old woman and the young one moving forward together, and they suggest that surviving, and offering compassion afterward, is a kind of victory.

In the Author's Note, Kate Quinn explains the history behind the novel. The Alice Network was a real First World War spy ring run by Louise de Bettignies, who worked as Alice Dubois, recruited agents across occupied France and Belgium, was captured by the Germans and died in 1918 at Siegburg prison after harsh treatment. Eve is fictional, but her experiences are drawn from the record of real women. René Bordelon is invented, a composite of real collaborators. Quinn also discusses the postwar purge of collaborators, including the shaving of women's heads, and the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. She wants to restore recognition to women who were largely forgotten.