"The Rose Code"

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of southern California, she attended Boston University where she earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Classical Voice. She has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga, and two books in the Italian Renaissance, before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, and The Rose Code. All have been translated into multiple languages. Quinn and her husband now live in San Diego with three rescue dogs.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Rose Code and reported the following:

If you were to flip to page 69 of my latest release, historical novel The Rose Code, you'd like be every bit as confused as my heroine finds herself:

If Bletchley Park had a motto, Mab thought, it would be “You dinnae need to know.”

“Are the other huts set up like this one?” Mab asked as she was whisked through the central corridor of Hut 6.

“You dinnae need to know,” said her new supervisor, a middle-aged woman with a crisp Scottish voice. “You're assigned to the Decoding Room...”

That's Mab's introduction to the top-secret world of Bletchley Park, a secluded country house in the middle of nowhere in Buckinghamshire where the best and brightest minds in Britain have been recruited to break the supposedly-unbreakable Axis military codes. Mab is a London shop-girl, sharp as a tack and just come to the Park clutching her secretarial degree and her wish to serve her country, and as she's whisked off to Hut 6, she's less introduced to her work than thrown into the deep end of it. And this scene on page 69 is a good introduction for the reader too—because the hush-hush air that shrouds Bletchley Park's work is the linchpin of The Rose Code, and “you dinnae need to know” will be both the savior and the bane of the characters' existence.

Mab is put to work as a decoder, and her oath of secrecy is so critical she's not allowed to tell her family, her friends, or even her roommates (who also work at Bletchley) what she does there. All the codebreakers work under the same oath, and they all take it seriously...so what happens when they find out someone's been talking, and Britain's codebreaking hub has a traitor in the midst?

Read The Rose Code to find out!

Learn more about the book and author at Kate Quinn's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kate Quinn and Caesar.

--Marshal Zeringue