Kate Quinn

I like to read books with badass female characters. Kate Quinn’s latest novel, The Briar Club, is a murder mystery with seven strong-willed women at the heart of the story. All of them rent rooms in a boarding house in Washington, D.C. It is the McCarthy era of the 1950s. After two dead bodies are found there, the roommates become suspects and the book dips forward in time then back to figure out what happened. 

Quinn is best known for her historical fiction, a literary genre where a fictional plot takes place in the setting of real historical events. Her books illuminate an unexamined slice of history and women are often at the forefront of the action. 

In The Briar Club, Grace March hosts a supper club every Thursday night, when the landlady is away from the house, inviting all the other tenants to her tiny room on the third floor. Friendships develop over the months and unlikely alliances are formed as they get to know each other over dinner. No one knows much about Grace until the end of the book when all hell breaks loose at a Thanksgiving get together.  

It isn’t an easy task to navigate so many characters, yet Quinn’s approach works well. Each chapter highlights a different tenant with her recipe included at the end of the chapter. Through their dining club, the women get to know each other. Their lives are brought to the table like an offering. When the police are called to the scene of the crime, almost all of them are questioned, but none of them fess up to what really happened. Even the house has a point of view, but it knows better than to reveal its opinion to anyone but the gals involved. 

If you haven’t read a Quinn novel, this is a good one to start with. The Briar Club tackles several historical events. From the creation of the birth-control pill, to the corruption of the D.C. police force, to the challenge of being an immigrant in America, Quinn reviews the hot topics of the era. The author is a copious researcher, skilled at amplifying details. She is consistently able to turn a complicated tale into a page turner. The struggles of artists and sports figures in a post war economy is examined as is the strain of domestic abuse in a failing marriage and what it’s like to be gay in America. 

Another book of Quinn’s that kept me coming back for more was The Rose Code. It highlights the friendship of three women who meet while working at Bletchley Park intelligence center in Great Britain during World War II. In an attempt to break the German Enigma code, a master at puzzles cracks the code, while her friends serve as a vital support system to her. One friend is based on the real-life woman Osla Benning who dated Prince Philip prior to his marriage to the future queen of England. The affair wasn’t fiction, but little is known about their actual interactions, and yet Quinn brings that relationship to life, masterfully weaving Osla’s spirited style as one of the code breakers. 

In The Diamond Eye, a Ukrainian woman becomes the deadliest sniper of World War II. Mila Pavlichenko, a real-life sharp shooter, interacts with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. This part is pure fiction, but a great way to spin a web that includes the Roosevelts who are center stage in the drama. 

And The Alice Network is about an actual female spy ring during World War I. In occupied France and Belgium, women worked as waitresses and secretaries to gather intel from German soldiers, risking their lives to prevent more bloodshed. 

All of these books are about remarkable females who have contributed in one way or another to the advancement of democracy in the western world. I don’t exclusively read historical novels, but I do make room on my bookshelf for Kate Quinn.