The Briar Club

Author: Kate Quinn
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2024
Pages: 432
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Washington, D.C., 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.

Review: I've seen Kate Quinn's novels get great reviews in some of my Facebook reading groups, so I was eager to give this new release a try. After a chapter of introduction, the reader meets each character individually, with Nora being the first. I was fully absorbed in Nora's life, and then her chapter ended and the story continued from Reka's perspective. I was still living Nora's life so I was a bit resentful of Reka, but then I fell into her backstory. This author can write. I'm looking forward to more Kate Quinn novels, but I need a break from historical fiction while I continue to absorb this novel.