Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nations 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; policemans daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the womens baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthys Red Scare.

 

Graces 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.

 

 Quinn evocatively balances the outward cheerfulness of the 1950s with historical observations exploring racism, misogyny, homophobia and political persecution in this sharply drawn, gripping novel. - People Magazine