The premise and wild tangle of storylines--not deep character development--are the highlights in this story about an easy-to-hate villain and his shocking, dastardly deeds. Strong women prevail in a messy lead-up to imperfect but ultimate justice. I've been continuing my cold-weather mystery-reading habits, and Lisa Jewell is always a good bet for an intriguing story, so I was excited to listen to another of her novels. After Nina Swann's semi-famous chef husband Paddy is kil

The many points of view within Allegra Goodman's novel made it feel somewhat disjointed, but the peeks into each character's internal struggles, motivations, and emotions coalesced into final gathering scenes that felt poignant and hopeful for individual characters and for the family as a whole. This Is Not About Us is poignant and wryly funny. Allegra Goodman's This Is Not About Us  is a story of an extended Jewish-American family. The three matriarchs are split by a death

The Books I'm Reading Now I'm reading Allegra Goodman's newest novel, which follows members of an extended Jewish-American family through life dramas large and small, This Is Not About Us ; I'm listening to Paula Lafferty's first novel in a series about a modern-day young woman told she is actually Queen Guinevere and asked to return to Camelot to save magic, The Once and Future Queen ; and I'm reading Yume Kitasei's climate fiction featuring two sisters determined to save th

Six More Favorite Contemporary Fiction Reads This is the third of three contemporary fiction lists I've put together as I've mined my recent-past reading for my favorite reads of the past year--you can find my first list of contemporary fiction favorite reads from last year here and my second list here . And you can explore the twelve titles on My Very Favorite Bossy 2025 Reads to find out about my overall favorite reads from last year, or you can read about past Bossy cont

The tone of The Secret Book Society is darker than I'd anticipated, but appropriate as Martin explores weighty issues for women in Victorian England. The power of books and of friendship ultimately triumph in Martin's historical fiction. The women in Madeline Martin's Victorian London exist within tightly constrained rules and at the whims of their fathers' or husbands' often controlling, sometimes abusive, always limiting requirements. But when three women, all strangers to

The initial installment of John McMahon's police procedural series follows a genius, socially awkward leader and a special team of FBI investigators who reinvent methods of finding their culprit in a smart, intriguing, and satisfying mystery. Head Cases  tracks FBI agent Gardner Camden (who has a brilliant analytical mind but is interpersonally awkward) and his group of agents in the Patterns and Recognitions (PAR) unit. A recent murder victim's DNA matches a long-dead serial