Yay! A new Kate Quinn novel! If you have been following along, you know I love Kate Quinn’s novels. Are they becoming more and more predictable? Yes, but who cares! I am here for the history lesson, and The Briar Club tackles a decade that I have not read much about before: the 1950s.

The Briar Club is set during the McCarthy “witch hunts”. For those of you not familiar with McCarthyism, during the 1940s and 1950s, US Senator Joseph McCarthy went wild with accusations of Communism after the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union soured post-WWII. A lot of people in the US found their lives ruined after being accused of being a Communist or having Communist sympathies, particularly people with liberal ideologies. There was fear that Communism was going to take over American democracy, a fear bolstered by Soviet spies being planted into American society.

The Briar Club opens on Thanksgiving Day in 1954 with a murder at Briarwood House, a boarding house for women located in Washington, DC. Who was murdered and who killed them is the central mystery of the novel that unfolds as we are first taken back to 1950 when the mysterious Grace March shows up at Briarwood House to rent a room. Grace arranges weekly dinner parties with the other women in the house, and the boarders eventually become friends who help each other out of difficult situations. Each boarder gets her own chapter to tell her story as the novel propels towards the Thanksgiving murder.

I appreciate Quinn’s ability to create several distinctive and empathetic female characters, and I like how each character is representative of a certain aspect of the 1950s, such as the Red Scare, the Korean War, the winding down of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and Operation Longhorn, a mock communist invasion staged in a small Texas town. I found that there are no surprises in The Briar Club as it is pretty obvious why Grace is such a mysterious character, but I still enjoyed reading this novel because of the camaraderie among the residents of Briarwood House. It is nice every once in awhile to read a book that wraps up all its loose ends and has a satisfying ending for each character.