The Briar Club

Washington, DC, 1950. Briarwood House is a shabby boardinghouse for women near the centre of the capital, where the residents keep to themselves and every tenant has something to hide. Then Grace March, a lovely and mysterious widow, takes the attic room.

Grace slowly draws her neighbors together. Fliss is a poised Englishwoman who plays the perfect wife and mother while carrying deep private hurts. Nora, a policeman's daughter, is tangled up with a shadowy gangster. Beatrice was a baseball star until the women's league of the war years folded and ended her career. Arlene, abrasive and zealous, has thrown herself into the Red Scare whipped up by McCarthy.

Grace hosts weekly dinner parties in her attic room and brews sun tea in the window, and these evenings become a comfort to all of them. But she is hiding a terrible secret of her own. When an act of violence shatters the household, the women must decide who the real enemy among them is.

This is historical fiction with an ensemble cast, built around friendship and loyalty under strain. It carries the paranoia of the McCarthy years and shows how women's roles are shifting in postwar America. The tone is intimate and tense, with a mystery running beneath the domestic scenes.