The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

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⭐ 3.5/5 Book Review: The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

👉 Grab The Briar Club on Amazon (affiliate link) 📚✨

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⚠️ Trigger Warnings

• Murder & violence ⚰️

• Domestic abuse 💔

• War trauma & PTSD 💣

• Sexuality and discrimination 🌈

• Political persecution & McCarthyism 🕵️‍♂️

• Betrayal & espionage 🕶️

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First Thoughts 💭

Okay, hear me out: The Briar Club would have been a killer mini-series. Imagine the drama, the secrets, the murder reveals—Netflix would eat this up 🍿.

But as a book? Whew 😮‍💨 … those chapters are LONG. Like “maybe I should also bring a snack for this reading session” long. The characters were great, the history was fascinating, and I even drooled over some of the recipes (seriously, historical fiction + food = genius). But the pacing? Let’s just say it took some stamina.

Still, the mystery was engaging, and the tenants of Briarwood House had me invested. Let’s break it down 👇

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📖 Overview (No Spoilers Yet)

The Briar Club is the latest historical fiction by Kate Quinn, bestselling author of The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Diamond Eye. Known for her strong female characters, Quinn once again delivers a story about women navigating a turbulent moment in history.

This one is set in 1950s Washington, D.C., against the backdrop of McCarthyism, communist paranoia, and Cold War tension. At the heart of the story: the residents of Briarwood House, a boardinghouse full of secrets, scandals, friendships, and yes… murder.

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🚨 Spoiler-Filled Plot Summary 🚨

Alright, let’s dish it all.

Murder at Thanksgiving 🦃🔪

The book opens with a bang—literally, two murders during Thanksgiving dinner in 1954. But instead of telling us what happened, Quinn rewinds and gives us the tenants’ backstories one loooong chapter at a time.

Meet the Tenants 🏠

• Grace March → The mysterious new tenant. Actually a former Soviet spy trying to reinvent herself as an American housewife.

• Nora → Ambitious National Archives worker, juggling career dreams and a shady romance.

• Reka → Elderly Hungarian refugee, robbed of precious artwork by a senator.

• Fliss → Young Englishwoman, juggling motherhood while yearning to return to nursing and contraception research.

• Bea → Ex-women’s baseball player sidelined by injury, swinging between purpose and despair.

• Claire → Secretly in love with a politician’s abused wife, desperate to build a home of her own.

• Arlene → HUAC worker, all-in on McCarthy’s propaganda, suspicious of everyone (and not exactly the best dinner guest 🙃).

• Pete → The boardinghouse owner’s young son, who provides another lens into the tenants’ lives.

And, hilariously, even the Briarwood House itself chimes in as a narrator. (Yep. The house has opinions 🏚️.)

The Briar Club is Born 🌸

Grace, the ex-spy with Martha Stewart energy, starts hosting Thursday dinners where each tenant brings a dish. She paints flowers on the walls, makes everyone talk to each other, and slowly transforms the gloomy boardinghouse into a little community.

Drama, Secrets, and Scandals 💥

• Nora chases ambition while tangled with gangland connections.

• Reka struggles with her stolen past.

• Fliss aches for independence in a world telling her to stay home.

• Bea’s sports career is gone, but her bat still has some use 👀.

• Claire dreams of love and escape.

• Arlene? Oh boy. She’s busy sniffing out “commies” among her own neighbors.

• Grace prays her spy past won’t catch up to her… but of course it does.

Thanksgiving 1954: Murder Night 🍂🩸

It all comes to a head during Thanksgiving dinner.

• Grace’s old spy partner shows up, ready to kill her. Instead, she kills him—protecting her friends and herself.

• Meanwhile, Claire’s lover’s abusive husband barges in drunk. Arlene mistakes him for another spy and whacks him with a baseball bat. Dead.

Now the Briar Club has two corpses on their hands.

The Cover-Up 🤫

Bound by friendship, loyalty, and survival, the tenants close ranks. They pass off the double homicide as a robbery gone wrong. No charges. No convictions. Just a lot of secrets behind closed doors.

And remarkably, each character goes on to build a better, freer future—proving the book’s theme: even in oppressive times, women find ways to survive, resist, and support one another.

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✍️ My Thoughts

• Strengths: The cast of characters was rich and compelling, the recipes were a clever and tasty touch, and I loved the historical backdrop. The mystery was solid, too.

• Weaknesses: The pacing. Y’all, these chapters are marathon-length. This book tested my attention span more than TikTok ever could 😂.

• Final Take: A thoughtful, layered story with a killer (literally) climax. Just… could’ve been trimmed down.

⭐ Final Verdict: 3.5/5 stars.

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📚 If You Liked This, You’ll Also Enjoy:

• The Rose Code by Kate Quinn 🕵️‍♀️ (WWII codebreakers + secrets)

• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng 🇺🇸 (political paranoia + survival)

• The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott ✍️ (Cold War women + espionage)

• The House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson 👩🏽‍🍼 (women’s struggles in mid-century D.C.)