Three Hours in Paris

Finished June 14

Three Hours in Paris by Cara Black

This novel is set during World War II, and begins in June 1940 with Kate Rees, a ranch woman from Oregon who is also a prize-winning marksman, is in Paris in an unoccupied apartment across from Montmartre, waiting to shoot Hitler. After a couple of chapters, we go back to the fall of 1939, where we learn that Kate is married to a Welsh man. They and their young daughter are living where he is stationed in the Orkney Islands. She works at a munitions factory as a tester, shooting rifles to ensure they work as they should. Her marksman skills get noticed and the government offers her a job, but she isn't interested. When an enemy bombing mission kills her husband and daughter, she initially gets lost in her grief, but by early June, she finds herself wanting to do what she can to defeat the man who took her family from her. So she calls the number of the man who made the previous offer to her. and finds herself offered a different job, this one top secret, and she must sign the Official Secrets Act before being told anything about it. 

Because of the timeliness of her mission, she is given a very sped up version of the usual training. One of her lessons emphasizes the acronym RADA, which stands for Read the Situation, Assess possible outcomes, Decide on options; Act on your decision. This is something she returns to repeatedly while on mission. 

When Kate misses and kills another man she finds herself on the run, and unknown to her, one of the reasons she is on this mission is because someone is compromised and the team she is associated with in France has had several members discovered and killed. As she follows what clues she has and makes the way around the city looking for help to get back to England, she must rely on her intuition and quick thinking. She also begins to suspect that she was never meant to succeed, and think about what that means. 

I found this book almost impossible to put down, as I had to know what happened to Kate. There is a man of Paris on the endpapers that shows all the key places that Kate either thinks of going to or actually visits. The pace is fast and the minor characters intriguing in their own ways. One of the characters that we see a lot of is a German police officer that is assigned with finding the would-be assassin and capturing her. Part of the novel is from his viewpoint, and we see that he has his own struggles as well. Excellent plot, with a character that I really cared about.