Parade Exclusive! Read an Excerpt From Kate Quinn’s New Novel “The Briar Club”

Here is an exclusive excerpt from author Kate Quinn’s latest blockbuster, The Briar Club.

Kate Quinn is the acclaimed, best-selling author of a string of hits and she knows something about time travel. Quinn ventured back to the Ancient World for her Empress of Rome Series then jumped forward some 1400 years to capture the Borgias.

But she really hit paydirt with WW I and a fascinating spy ring Quinn immortalized with her blockbuster novel The Alice Network. The two world wars proved ripe pickings for Quinn’s storytelling with one bestseller after another, such as The Huntress and The Diamond Eye .

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Now she’s setting up shop in the 1950s and the McCarthy era. Her newest novel The Briar Club focuses on the women at a seen-better-days boarding house in Washington DC. The widow Grace March is the newest member of this unofficial group and the one who almost invisibly pulls them together.

They are a network of women making their way through the post-war years, only to discover their roles and options in life are being narrowed or removed entirely. It's as if the war and their accomplishments and heroism never happened. Toss in an act of violence and the Red Scare and these women will either come together for good–thorns and all–or be ripped apart.

Parade Exclusive! Read an Excerpt From Kate Quinn’s New Novel “The Briar Club”

T he Briar Club by Kate Quinn ($28.99; William Morrow) Buy now from Harper Collins , Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

The following is the opening section of author Kate Quinn’s newest novel, The Briar Club.

Excerpt from THE BRIAR CLUB by Kate Quinn. Copyright © 2024 by Kate Quinn. Used with permission by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

Thanksgiving 1954

Washington D.C.


If these walls could talk. Well, they may not be talking, but they are certainly listening. And watching.

Briarwood House is as old as the century. The house has presided—brick-fronted, four-storied, slightly dilapidated—over the square below for fifty-four years. It’s seen three wars, ten presidents, and countless tenants . . . but until tonight, never a murder. Now its walls smell of turkey, pumpkin pie, and blood, and the house is shocked down to its foundations.

Also, just a little bit thrilled. This is the most excitement Briarwood House has had in decades.

Murder. Murder here in the heart of sleepy, white-picket-fence Washington D.C.! And on Thanksgiving, too. Not that the house is terribly surprised by that; it’s held enough holidays to know that when you throw all that family together and mix with too much rum punch and buried resentment, blood is bound to be shed sometimes. But the scene that erupted tonight and splashed gore from the threshold to the attic . . .

Goodness, but it’s a doozy.

There’s a corpse on the floor of the second attic apartment, spilling a lake of blood from a throat cut nearly to the bone. In the front hall below there’s a detective scribbling in his notepad. In the kitchen, sixteen people are milling around in varying stages of shock: old and young, male and female, some crying, some silent. And all of them, the house knows—having watched the whole thing explode from shocking beginning to even more shocking end—are nursing various reasons to fear that they will end the night in handcuffs.

The police detective comes into the kitchen to talk with Briarwood House’s owner and landlady, but she’s busy having hysterics. The house flutters its curtains, rattles a door or two, takes another peek into the murder scene on the top floor. The green walls of that particular apartment are painted over with a vast, intricate flowered vine, but you’d be hard pressed to tell what kind of flowers under the blood splatter. This was a very enthusiastic murder, the house muses. Not one moment’s hesitation from the hand swinging that blade.

“We have not yet identified the deceased, Mrs. Nilsson,” the detective is saying to the landlady when the house’s attention flits back to the kitchen. “No identification was found on the body.”

“Well, I hope you don’t expect me to look at it! My nerves being what they are—” She pushes away the glass of water being urged on her by her lanky teenage son.

“We have preliminary reports that the death occurred between six and seven in the evening. I understand you weren’t at home at the time, Mrs. Nilsson?”

“I was out at my bridge club. I’m always out at my bridge club on Thursday nights.”

“Even on Thanksgiving?” The detective sounds dubious. If you’d seen as many holidays turn nasty as I have, the house wants to tell him, you’d be surprised everyone isn’t ducking them.

“Shocking waste, Thanksgiving. I provide a turkey lunch for my boarders, but that isn’t enough for some people.” Mrs. Nilsson sniffs, eyeing her son who still hovers with the water glass. “This one won’t lift a finger for his mother in the kitchen, but the moment That Woman says she’s making a whole turkey in my Stratoliner oven—”

Briarwood House doesn’t like Mrs. Nilsson. Hasn’t liked her since she first crossed the threshold as a bride, complaining before she’d even shaken the rice out of her hair that the halls were too narrow ( my halls! Too narrow!) , and still doesn’t like her twenty years down the road. No one else in this room does either, the house knows perfectly well. People aren’t that hard to read.

“The body was found in the fourth floor apartment, the one with green walls.” The detective is looking down at his notes, so he misses his first clue: the tense glances that pass shadow-fast among the other fifteen witnesses. Or would suspects be a better word? the house wonders. Because it knows something the detective doesn’t.

The killer is still very much in this room.

“Can you tell us who rents that top-floor apartment, Mrs. Nilsson?” the detective persists, oblivious.

The landlady gives another sniff, and the house settles in happily to listen. “Mrs. Grace March.”



Four and a half years earlier

June 1950


Chapter 1

PETE


Dear Kitty,

Does the name “Briarwood House” sound auspicious? We shall see!

I wish you were here. — Grace


June sunshine poured over the street, the sounds of a jazz saxophone drifted over from next door, somewhere on Capitol Hill Senator McCarthy was waving lists of card-carrying American Commies, and a new guest had come to the Briarwood boarding house. Her shadow fell across Pete where he knelt on the front stoop banging a nail into the flapping screen door, and he looked up to register a tall woman with a red beret over a tumble of golden brown hair.

“Hello there,” she said in a soft midwestern drawl, nodding at the sign in the window. “I see you have rooms to rent?”

Pete scrambled upright, dropping his hammer. He’d thought he was being so alert: keeping an eye on the street over his toolbox, eagle-eyed for any signs of a rumpus. Not that the square ever had much in the way of rumpus, but you never knew. What if some dirty no-good louse from the Warring gang shot up the Amber Club just across the square, making off with a bag of the long green? If that went down and the feds came sniffing, the word on the street would point to the shadowy figure across the way. You want the long and short, you talk to the shamus at Briarwood House. Nothing gets past Pistol Pete . And then Pete would rise, flicking his cigarette and straightening his battered trilby . . .

But instead a woman had walked right up to him while he was tacking down a screen, and he’d nearly dropped his hammer on her ribbon-laced espadrille.

“Mickey Spillane,” she said, nodding at the paperback copy of I, the Jury he’d set aside on the front stoop after his mother swooped in with a reminder about the screen door. “Your favorite?”

“I, uh. Yes, ma’am. I’m Pete,” he added hastily. “Pete Nilsson.”

Her wide mouth quirked, and she stooped to pick up his hammer. “Then maybe you could tell me how a lady can get a room here, Hammerin’ Pete.”

Just like that, Pete fell in love. He been falling in love an awful lot since turning thirteen—sometimes with the girls in his class at Gompers Junior High, mostly with Nora Walsh up in 4A with her soft Irish vowels, occasionally with Arlene Hupp and her bouncy ponytail in 3C—but this dame in the red beret was something special. She was maybe thirty-five or something (old enough to have an interesting past), worn suitcase swinging from one hand and a camel coat belted around the kind of figure Detective Mike Hammer (Pete’s hero) would have described as a mile of Pennsylvania highway.

And she’d called him Hammerin’ Pete . He junked Pistol Pete on the spot, wishing he could cock his trilby back on his head and drawl “Let me show you the joint, ma’am” but unfortunately he wasn’t wearing a trilby, just an old Senators cap, and from inside his mother’s voice snapped “Pete, who are you gabbing to out there? Have you finished with that door?”

“Someone’s come about the room, Mom. Mrs—” He looked back, realizing he hadn’t asked her name.

“March.” Another of those slow, amused smiles. “Mrs. Grace March.”

T he Briar Club by Kate Quinn ($28.99; William Morrow) Buy now from Harper Collins, Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

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