The Rose Code – Kate Quinn
Swedish title: Roskoden
Original publication year: 2021

One sentence pitch: Three ladies worked with decoding messages during the Second World War and now one of them claims she was wrongfully sent to the mad house.

This book has been lying at a shelf at my parent’s house for several years waiting for me to pick it up. I picked it up in my audiobook service app on a whim, fully intending to borrow the physical copy next time I was visiting. I was hooked and finished it before I could.

The Rose Code is not a small book, I guess that is one of the reasons as to why it took me so long to pick up. It didn’t feel like a long book, the pages flew by and it was easy to just continue reading.

We get the story simultaneously from two timelines, I think this was very well done. The pacing between the different timelines gave us everything we needed at the right time, the length of the different sections fine tuned to fit good.

Since this book takes place during the Second World War and the characters is much involved, it was not surprising that bad things happened. I’m not a fan of too sad stories but I think these events had their place in the stories. My heart ached for some characters, I cheered on others and was just there for the last ones.

The mystery element was cleverly done. I did think there probably was a reason as to why some information was withheld for quite some time but that I didn’t guess it made it more exciting when we got there. The plotting that followed was very pleasant to read.

This story has a little bit of everything and it gave me a bit of a book hangover, making me pick up something completely different to make sure they weren’t compared to each other.

I liked Kate Quinn’s way to tell a story, the translation to Swedish was very nicely done. I am eager to read more of her. Her author’s note at the end had some interesting facts of the people in the story, some were based on real people, and how these were integrated into the book.

I gave this 4,5 out of 5 stars – I really liked it!