Excerpt from The Briar Club by Kate Quinn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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 boardinghouse. 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: watching 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 off 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), with a 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 the house his mother's voice snapped "Pete, who are you gabbing to? Have you finished with that door?"

"Someone's come about the room, Mom. Mrs.—" He looked back, realizing he hadn't asked the woman's name.

"March." Another of those slow, amused smiles. "Mrs. Grace March."

Pete's mother popped out, face pink and irritated over her quilted housecoat, and she gave the newcomer a once-over even as she introduced herself. "Mrs., you said?" Clearly trying to appraise if there was a wedding ring under Mrs. March's white glove. "I run my boardinghouse for ladies only, if you and your husband—"

"I was widowed last year." Mrs. March sounded remarkably composed about that fact, Pete thought.

Excerpted from The Briar Club by Kate Quinn. Copyright © 2024 by Kate Quinn. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.