I am beginning to feel confident that Kate Quinn is a writer that I can rely on to churn out a great historical fiction novel. The Alice Network, The Huntress and now The Rose Code are all novels that I very much enjoyed reading. These three novels all have World War II as the backdrop, but each focuses on a different aspect of the war, and each one is well researched and intricately plotted. The Rose Code is about the people who worked at Bletchley Park during the war and helped win the war by cracking enemy military code and deciphering enemy communications.

The central characters of Kate Quinn’s novels are usually women, and The Rose Code is told from the perspective of three very different women who worked in different sections at Bletchley Park but still became the best of friends, until they betrayed each other just before the war ended.

There is Osla Kendall, based on the real-life Osla Benning, who was a Canadian debutante and Prince Philip’s girlfriend during the war and before he got married to the future Queen Elizabeth II. Fictional Osla is determined to prove she is more than just “a silly deb”. She was shipped off to Canada as the war started but finds a way back to England so that she can do her part for the war effort. Like the real Osla, she first works in a factory building Hurricane fighter planes before her fluency in German lands her at Bletchley Park translating decoded communications.

Then there’s Mab Churt, who was born and raised in poverty in the East End of London. She is determined to better herself so that she can find a good, stable husband and move up in the world. She takes a secretarial course to gain better employment, which is how she ends up at Bletchley Park and eventually works on the codebreaking machines.

Osla and Mab meet on the train to Bletchley, and they end up bunking together in the village at Beth Finch’s house. Beth is older than both Osla and Mab, but she is incredibly shy and lives under her religious mother’s thumb. It is not explicitly stated (given the time period the novel is set in), but Beth appears to have autism spectrum disorder. People think she is simple, but she is quite the genius at crosswords. Osla and Mab feel sorry for her and want to help her get out from under her tyrannical, abusive mother, so Osla mentions Beth’s crossword talent to the bosses at Bletchley Park. Beth is then summoned to the Park and thrust into a job as a cryptanalyst where she discovers she is quite brilliant at breaking enemy code.

The Rose Code begins after the war in 1947, just days before Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip gets married (their marriage becomes an important part of the 1947 timeline), and the reader quickly discovers that the three protagonists have not spoken to each other in years and that one of them has been locked up in an asylum because she discovered there was a traitor at Bletchley Park who was passing secrets to the enemy. Their time at Bletchley Park is told in flashbacks: how they met and became best friends, the struggles they went through during the war, how they ended up betraying each other, and how one of them ended up in the asylum before she could unmask the traitor.

Now, I think I have gotten to the point in my reading life where nothing can surprise me anymore because I could see all the major events and reveals coming in this novel, but I really did not care. I enjoyed reading The Rose Code because I enjoy immersing myself in a past that I can never live in. Kate Quinn really knows how to write historical fiction, because this novel is so authentically the 1930s and 1940s. Also, Bletchley Park was a fascinating place full of an eclectic mix of people. It was a place where intelligent women with little formal education were able to shine as they helped cracked enemy code, and where they were appreciated and admired by their male peers for their brilliant minds.

The main reason I was invested in The Rose Code, though, was because of Osla, Mab and Beth’s story. The novel is more about their friendship and how this friendship informs each of them as a person than it is about finding out who the traitor at Bletchley Park is. I did not want to put this novel down until I had found out whether their friendship survives through the ending. And now that I am done, I cannot wait for Kate Quinn’s next World War II novel.