Author: Kate Quinn
Year published: 2024
Category: Adult fiction (mystery)
Pages: 432 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (Washington, DC)
Summary: Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
Review: This is attempt number 2 for me to read this book and it stuck this time (the first time was definitely me, not the novel). I have really enjoyed the previous Kate Quinn novels that I've read (links to my reviews: The Huntress; The Diamond Eye; The Alice Network, and my favorite, The Rose Code).
Each of the women staying at Briarwood House is a suspect in the murders, and I liked that we learned more about them as they each had a section of the book. It was good that each of their chapters progressed the story through time as well, so we learned about the other characters at the same time. My favorite section was the woman who played baseball in the All-American Girls Baseball League.
In between the women's chapters, the House itself describes the present (1954) events as the police are investigating the double murder. I like that the House itself is a character in this novel, telling some of its secrets and opinions in its brief pages.
This one took a little bit for me to get into it but once I got going, it was full steam ahead and I stayed up late last night to finish it. I think of Kate Quinn as a historical fiction writer and when the McCarthy era bits kicked in the story really shone. And, I loved her Author Note at the end in which she explains how each character fit into the historical time.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
- Big Book Summer--432 pages
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