The Briar Club by Kate Quinn Book Guide

The whole thing kicks off on Thanksgiving, 1954, inside a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse that’s seen better days. A corpse lies in a pool of blood. Through the keyhole of an attic apartment, we see a world of trouble, and Briarwood House itself, the narrator in these moments, is both shocked and a little thrilled by the excitement. A detective is on the scene, but the house knows something he doesn’t: the killer is still in the building, one of the seventeen people milling about in the kitchen downstairs. The victim is unidentified, but the apartment belongs to a Mrs. Grace March. From this bloody, immediate present, the story throws itself back four and a half years to ask, how on earth did we get here?

It’s June 1950. The story picks up through the eyes of Pete Nilsson, the teenage son of the boardinghouse’s prickly landlady. Pete is a boy lost in the pages of Mickey Spillane novels, dreaming of being a private eye. His world, and the quiet, disconnected world of Briarwood House, is turned on its head by the arrival of Grace March. She’s a charming, mysterious woman from Iowa who takes the tiny, undesirable attic room (the future crime scene) and sees not a dump, but a place with “potential.” And almost immediately, she begins to change things. My first impression of Grace was that she’s a classic catalyst character, but her methods are so subtle. She brings the disparate women of the house together not through grand gestures, but with small acts of community: a jar of sun tea, a plate of sandwiches, an impromptu gathering to listen to President Truman announce the “police action” in Korea. She nurtures the women, and Pete, seeing the potential in all of them. This is the birth of the “Briar Club,” an informal sisterhood that forms around Grace’s kitchen table.

Each chapter then shifts focus to one of the women, gradually revealing the secrets they all carry. There is Nora Walsh, a sharp secretary at the National Archives from a family of corrupt Irish cops. She finds herself in a complicated romance with Xavier Byrne, the owner of a local bottle club who is revealed to be a high-ranking member of the Warring crime family. When Nora witnesses him commit a brutal act of violence, she is pulled into a world she was desperately trying to escape. Then you have Reka Muller, an elderly Hungarian artist and refugee, bitter and closed-off, who fled the Nazis only to have her family’s priceless Klimt sketches stolen by her American sponsor. Her story is one of deep loss and simmering rage.

Fliss Orton is the bubbly English war bride, outwardly perfect but internally crumbling under the weight of motherhood and postpartum depression while her doctor husband serves in Tokyo. Bea Verretti is a former star of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, her career cut short by a knee injury, now adrift and teaching PE to uninterested teenagers. And there is Claire Hallett, a cynical, tough-as-nails secretary for Senator Margaret Chase Smith who is hiding a traumatic past from the Great Depression and a secret, dangerous love affair. Circling them all is Arlene Hupp, a petty and ambitious Texan working for the House Un-American Activities Committee, who embodies the paranoia of the McCarthy era and serves as the group’s initial antagonist.

The story moves forward through the years, marked by suppers, secrets shared, and small kindnesses. The women, initially just ships passing in the night, become a found family. They help Lina, Pete’s sister, get new glasses. They support Bea in her quest to become a baseball scout. They tolerate Arlene. Through all this, Grace remains the calm center, the listener who never shares her own past. The interstitial sections, narrated by the personified Briarwood House, provide a unique perspective. The house awakens from a long slumber, growing fond of its ladies, watching their lives intersect, and dropping hints about the tragedy to come.

What was Grace’s secret? We learn she is Galina Stepanova, a defected Soviet spy. Trained in a mock American town and paired with a ruthless partner, Kirill, she was inserted into the U.S. during the Cold War. But the abundance and freedom of America, contrasted with her own past surviving the Leningrad siege where her family starved, caused her to break. She disappeared from her mission, taking with her a file of top-secret aviation plans from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, and created a new identity as Grace March.

The story comes full circle on that fateful Thanksgiving in 1954. All the women of the Briar Club, along with their various lovers and friends, are gathered for a true feast. The first murder victim is Kirill, Grace’s former partner. He tracked her down after seeing a newspaper photo of her at Lina’s Pillsbury Bake-Off competition. He arrives intending to kill her for her treason. In a frantic chase through the house, he attacks Fliss before Grace confronts him in her attic room. Her pistol misfires, but Bea, the ex-ballplayer, arrives just in time and cracks Kirill with her baseball bat. Grace grabs Kirill’s own weapon—a garden sickle—and finishes the job.

As the house reels from this, a second man arrives: Barrett Sutherland, the abusive husband of Claire’s lover, Sydney. Drunk and enraged, he followed Sydney to Briarwood House. In the chaos that follows, he attacks Harland (Bea’s FBI boyfriend) and threatens the women. Arlene, fueled by years of resentment and the patriotic fervor of the Red Scare, mistakes him for another Communist spy and kills him with Bea’s bat.

This is the ending. Two bodies. One a Soviet agent, the other a senator’s son. The police are on their way. Now the Briar Club faces its greatest test. They must decide whether to turn Grace in or protect her. In a tense, emotional debate, they choose loyalty. Led by Harland, they fabricate a story for the police: Kirill was a lone, crazed intruder who killed Sutherland before being killed himself in a struggle. They all cry, play their parts as hysterical women, and the police buy it.

In the aftermath, Grace knows she cannot stay and put her friends at further risk. She packs her bags, but she doesn’t leave alone. She takes the fragile, now-broken Arlene with her, intending to care for her. The final pages jump forward to May 1956. Briarwood House is thriving under the care of Pete and his father, who has returned. Pete, now a young man, receives an unsigned postcard from New York showing the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s from Grace, writing about helping with Arlene’s wedding plans and sending her love to the Briar Club.