The Briar Club is bestselling author Kate Quinn’s gutsy drama and suspense-filled new historical fiction novel featuring strong female characters. Read my full review.

Publication: HarperCollins Australia, July 2024.

Genre: Historical, Drama, Romance, Mystery, Thriller

The Briar Club Publisher Synopsis

Five women, five dangerous secrets

Washington, D.C., 1950

Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades.

But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their troubled lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. And when a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club 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.

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post we may earn a small commission to help offset our running costs.

My Review

After being captivated by the stirring narrative in her recent collaboration with Janie Chang, The Phoenix Crown, I was ready to dive into whatever novel Kate Quinn published next. And, like the former title, The Briar Club centres on a fascinatingly diverse and strong-willed female ensemble cast in a particularly evocative time period in US history.

The residents of the Briarwood boarding house and their guests come and go over the 5-year story timespan, so this is not a locked-room mystery. However, Quinn very successfully evokes a similar feeling of mystery, mistrust and dread within this microcosm by starting with a shocking crime scene, and then moving back in time to judiciously reveal the myriad influences that led up to that day.

The Briar Club‘s time-jumping narrative featuring different character perspectives may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed the puzzling mental stimulation. Quinn employs this structure well to develop characters with depth, authentic baggage and emotions while gradually ramping up the tension and suspense.

My favourite element, and a surprise for me, was how the Briarwood house itself is a sentient, all-seeing character with a perspective of its own, which we are introduced to in the prologue.

It’s seen three wars, ten presidents, and countless tenants… but until tonight, never a murder. Now its walls smell of turkey, pumpkin pie and blood, And the house is shocked down to its foundations.

Also, just a little bit thrilled. This is the most excitement Briarwood House has had in decades.

This quirkiness captured me from page 1 and this character perspective dropping in throughout the novel acted as a wonderful counterpoint to the many heavy societal topics explored, such as women’s rights, racism, war and the Red Scare.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism . . .

Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club is a compelling slow-burn suspense thriller that shines a spotlight on the resilience and revolutionary acts of many day-to-day women in the not-so-distant past, paving the way to a better society.