The Briar Club

The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950

Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades.

But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their troubled lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. And when a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club 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.