Kate Quinn Has Outdone Herself!

As you all (or most of you) know, I am a big fan of Kate Quinn's The Alice Network and The Huntress.  I rated both of them 3.75/4.  I mean, those are high marks!  But The Rose Code has them both beat.  Did I give it a 4/4?  I did not.  Was it 3.8, 3.85, 3.9, or 3.95?  Nope.  Well what's higher than 4/4?  I'll tell you...  it's a 4/4+.  That's right.  It's better than a 4/4. And it's been 3 years since I gave my last 4/4+ (Kristin Harmel's The Sweetness of Forgetting).  This book is just that good.  Let me read the The Rose Code's introduction:

In the autumn of 1939, Hitler's advance seemed unstoppable.  

          German military communications were relayed using

          hand ciphers, teleprinter codes, and above all Enigma

        machines - portable cipher devices that scrambled orders 

      into nonsense so that they could be relayed via Morse code over

            radio transmitters, then unscrambled in the field.

                Even if the scrambled orders were intercepted 

              by the Allies, no one could break the encryption.

                 Germany thought Enigma was unbreakable.

                                       They were wrong.

This is the story of the men and women who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII going non-stop to intercept the German communications and break the codes.  The story centers on 3 very different women.  And you get caught up with each of them from the get-go.  Here are just a few of the reasons that, all combined, blew me away and made me love this book:

1.  Prince Philip (yes, that Prince Philip) has a significant role throughout the book.

2.  The story alternates in the voices of the 3 women.

3.  One of the women writes something called Bletchley Bletherings, which is a little gossip column.

4.  All of the support characters are interesting in and of themselves.

5.  Because it's historical fiction, we get to see Churchill and even that old codebreaker Alan Turing.

6.  There were so many emotional moments where I got chills, or teared up, or uttered an expletive!

7.  It obviously goes without saying, but Kate can really write.

Make sure you read the Author's Note at the end of the book.  It puts a lot of what she wrote about in historical context.  That was also fascinating.  

I have just two questions for Kate.  What's next?  And when?  Please don't make me wait too long!