A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell Reading histories of World War II, one could assume that the resistance movement in France was populated entirely by men. Not so, as two recent biographies of heroic women ... [Continue Reading]
The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
How Rona Jaffe came to write her bestseller The Best of Everything (published 1958) is almost as dramatic as the book itself. The young Jaffe had recently quit her first job at Fawcett Publications to write full time. She had a few stories published in national publications but was still living ... [Continue Reading]
An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch
In 1878, the aristocratic private detective Charles Lenox travels to America on a mission for Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch. Not long after his arrival, a debutant dies under mysterious circumstances, and Lenox is abruptly summoned from New York City to ... [Continue Reading]
Snowdrift by Helene Tursten
In Snowdrift by Helene Tursten, Embla Nyström, a Detective Inspector with the Gothenburg, Sweden, police force, investigates the deaths of two well-known criminals and a cold case involving a childhood friend. Her colleague is a handsome detective and his police dog. Although I still miss Irene ... [Continue Reading]
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
The Thursday Murder Club kept appearing on various “recommended for you” lists, but I initially resisted buying it as it sounded rather insipid, like those mystery novels where the amateur sleuth’s cat is a major character. In Richard Osman’s novel, four residents of a posh British retirement ... [Continue Reading]
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin takes place on a planet called the Stillness. Not our earth exactly, but a place with recognizable features like oceans and mountains, roads and cities. Many of the inhabitants have human-like traits and features, but some races possess supernatural ... [Continue Reading]
Beheld by TaraShea Nesbit
Do you remember those colorful pictures of the Puritans that appeared every November on the bulletin board of your third-grade classroom? Dark suited men with buckled shoes and tall black hats and docile women with bowed heads were depicted celebrating the harvest with agreeable, feathered ... [Continue Reading]
First: Sandra Day O’Connor by Evan Thomas
When Justice O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, arrived at the Supreme Court in 1981, one of the first things she did was establish an early morning aerobics class for her female clerks; attendance was mandatory. It was held in the basketball court above the courtroom and open to all ... [Continue Reading]
The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren
Although there had been residential hotels for bachelors and families for decades (see The Thin Man movies), until the early twentieth century there were no residential hotels for women because there was no need for such a thing. American women stayed home. But in 1903, recognizing a nascent ... [Continue Reading]
While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams
While Justice Sleeps is not Stacey Abrams’ first work of fiction, but it is her first legal thriller. The former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, and founder of Fair Fight, Fair Count, and the Southern Economic Advancement ... [Continue Reading]