It’s been a busy week, between reading for deadline and some fun events. So, I’m going to give you a peek ahead today.

Kate Quinn’s latest book is The Phoenix Crown, written with Jamie Chang. But, in July, her next book is out, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, set in a women’s boardinghouse in Washington,, D.C. during the McCarthy era. I’ll remind you later about The Briar Club, but, if you like historical fiction about women’s friendship, you might want to watch for this one.

Here’s the publisher’s description of 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, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

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

As I said, The Briar Club is one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ll remind you of it later this year.