Book Reviews
Book Review by Julie Kish
The Briar Club
A novel by Kate Quinn
William Morrow, 2024
Kate Quinn is one of my favourite historical fiction writers. I have read four of her previous novels: The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code and The Diamond Eye. They are all heart-wrenching stories set in WWI or WWII with strong female heroines that come alive and jump off the page. Her latest novel, The Briar Club, takes place in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s McCarthy era, when paranoia is rampant and everyone believes there are Russian spies living among them. The Briar Club is not only a meticulously researched historical novel that makes the reader feel like they’ve been transported back in time; it’s also a good old-fashioned murder mystery.
The setting is an all-female boarding house known as the Briarwood House, and its residents make this character-driven novel shine. Grace March is a widow who never talks about her past. Nora is a police officer’s daughter who is involved with a gangster. Bea was a professional baseball player in the Women’s League during the war but has become a lost soul. Fliss is a British war bride and former nurse who looks after her baby on her own while her physician husband prepares to leave for Korea. Arlene works for the government and has thrown herself heavily into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
The story kicks off with the discovery of two bodies in the boarding house, but the reader doesn’t know who is dead or who killed them. The author then backpedals four years to introduce the women who live in the house, all the while hinting that some of them may end up as a murder victim and others may be murderers.
The author excels at creating strong, relatable women, and she executes an intense dive into the characters living in Briarwood House. There is a focus on the importance of female relationships in a patriarchal society. The women are initially strangers, but they learn to rely on each other even if they don’t completely trust each other. One interesting twist is the author’s use of the Briarwood House as a character. Some short chapters describe the events from the house’s perspective. “If these walls could talk. Well, they may not be talking, but they are certainly listening. And watching.”
One of the standout aspects of the book is how the author picks out bits of history and weaves them into the plot, such as the early days of the birth control pill and the beginning of the civil rights movement.
This multi-layered, complex novel is rich and immersive, and the intriguing characters stayed with me long after I finished reading.