Louise Penny the Madness of Crowds As soon as I finished the seventeenth Chief Inspector Gamache novel, I complained to anyone who would listen! For those of you who missed my rants----The Madness of Crowds is terrible. If you haven’t read the Gamache novels, the earlier ones are wonderful and ... [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]
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]
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
Last month I had dinner at The Palm with a dozen or so women. Toward the end of the meal I asked (apropos of what I can’t remember), “By a show of hands, how many of you were homecoming queen?” Rita Mitchell, our esteemed host, looked vaguely irritated, because this is not at all the sort of ... [Continue Reading]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
How could I resist a book with such an unusual title set on an island about which I know nothing (cows, right?) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a charming novel of 1946 London and Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. London based writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a ... [Continue Reading]