The Briar Club
by Kate Quinn
Buy on AmazonWashington, DC, 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.…
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"At Briarwood House, women young and old rent rooms from a bitter landlord who resents the children left behind by her ex-husband. But with the arrival of widow Grace March, these disparate boarders slowly become something more than just housemates. With the novel set during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s, discussions of the fear of communism are mixed with in-depth portraits of each resident Kate Quinn employs to weave a tale. This rare female view of the era starts with a murder and then takes us back in time to slowly unfold a mystery and a drama that are compelling, warm and, at times, heartbreaking."
NPR Books We Love — 2024 · apps.npr.org
"Narrator Saskia Maarleveld enlivens the characters in this masterfully crafted window onto the 1950s. While there are murders and other crimes, the focus is the individual stories of the women boarders of Briarwood House in Washington, DC. Maarleveld’s talent for accents coupled with Quinn’s vivid writing makes this audiobook a compelling and informative listening experience. (15 hours)"
The Best Mystery & Suspense Audiobooks of 2024 · fivebooks.com