The Diamond Eye

Mila Pavlichenko is a young history student and single mother in Kyiv when the German army pours across the Soviet border in 1941, and she volunteers for the Red Army with a rifle she learned to shoot at a shooting club. Over the next year she becomes Lady Death, a sniper credited with more than three hundred kills on the Eastern Front, and is then pulled out of combat and sent on a goodwill tour of the United States, where she befriends Eleanor Roosevelt and unwittingly becomes the target of a plot closer to home than any battlefield. Kate Quinn builds her novel on the real Pavlichenko's memoirs, pairing trench-level detail with political intrigue for a propulsive historical thriller about the costs, personal and public, of becoming a weapon.