With her latest romance novel, “The Chemistry of Love,” author Sariah Wilson takes a much-used trope and makes it unique. She delivers her usual delightful dialogue and characters with intriguing professional positions. In this romcom, the main character, tall, gawky, unsophisticated Anna Ellis is a cosmetic chemist. It’s a career, a niche of science, that most of us never really think about — even those of us who layered on makeup pre-pandemic.
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Lyn Liao Butler’s newest novel is a thriller, and she provides carefully curated clues to help us figure out what is really going on. The ambiguity of some of the narrative is purposefully confusing, but she clearly creates a main character who is filled with sadness and self-doubt and who is trying to overcome recent loss in her life.
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We know what we are going to get when we read a romance/mystery by Jayne Ann Krentz, and her newest novel in a new trilogy, “Sleep No More,” doesn’t disappoint. Krentz is the master at writing suspenseful mysteries that, at their core, are also very much about attraction and romance. We keep reading her novels because of the way she brings new characters, new situations, and new mystery into each new piece.
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In “The Woman with the Cure,” Lynn Cullen’s masterful historical fiction, she focuses on Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, a little-known woman scientist, who made important contributions in the race to find a way to eradicate polio. Cullen also brings to life familiar figures in the race against polio such as Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. We learn much about both men, and of course, they are the scientists who come to mind when we think of those who created polio vaccines that saved so many lives. Cullen brings to the forefront the women who also performed important work, work that enabled these two famous men to create their vaccines. But as with so many brilliant women in history, the real women we meet in this story, especially Dorothy Horstmann, have remained largely invisible until Cullen’s research demonstrates their dedication, their determination, and their desperate attempts to destroy this horrific disease.
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Fans of Pam Jenoff know that her historical fiction titles are enthralling, with admirable sympathetic characters, and based on real incidents. “Code Name Sapphire” features three such women whose bravery, determination, and strength are fully tested during the harsh and cruel Nazi rule in WWII.
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The action starts on the very first page in “Every Missing Girl,” the second thriller in the “Kendall Beck” series by Leanne Kale Sparks. Main character Kendall Beck is an FBI agent in Colorado who works with missing children, tracking them down and trying to uncover child trafficking rings. It’s pretty horrifying work, and in this case, her good friend, detective Adam Taylor, has a personal reason for trying to solve a missing child case. His own niece, Frankie, has disappeared. Making it even more personal, the disappearance happened right after a kid’s hockey game that Frankie played in and they attended.
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In “The House of Eve,” we read about three years in the lives of two young but very different Black women, Ruby and Eleanor, and we learn great deal about their situations. We also learn not only about life in the early 1950s, but about the abusive and sometimes misogynistic treatment of women in those times before any real emphasis on women’s rights. And that on the ladder of social ills and mistreatment of women, Black women were on the lowest of the rungs. A college student at Howard University, Eleanor learns right at the start of the story, after being denied admittance into the desirable ABC (Alpha Beta Chi) sorority, “that Negroes separated themselves by color.” There is an irony that being Black and attending a Black university did not exempt the students from being subject to cruel prejudice based on the color of their skin. Eleanor’s roommate, Nadine, is from a wealthy Washington, DC family, unlike Eleanor, whose family comes from very modest roots in a small town in Ohio. Eleanor’s parents scraped and saved, and her mother baked and sold pastries to help Eleanor go to Howard University.
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In “All the Dangerous Things,” author Stacy Willingham addresses many dangerous “things,” but points out that nothing might be as dangerous as people with mental health problems who don’t receive the help and support they need. This carefully wrought mystery keeps us guessing until the end about several deaths in the story. And while we think we know what happened because the main character, Isabelle Drake is the first person narrator, as is the case with many such narratives, we can’t be sure that what she shares is the truth.
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There is the universal problem with the house guest who won’t leave, and in “The House Guest,” author Hank Phillippi Ryan delivers a house guest who is definitely more than she first appears to be. Actually, the situation suggests the plural form of this singular title; a second title might well be “The House Guests.”
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Amy Poeppel doesn’t write thrillers or mysteries with stunning twists that surprise. Rather, as with her new release, “The Sweet Spot,” she writes about people who are like you and me. She creates people who suffer and act accordingly; people who do stupid things and regret it. In this novel, she introduces us to a woman we don’t like very much. Melinda has just been dumped by her husband of 30 years for a younger Felicity, and she’s angry. That’s actually a gross understatement. She’s furious, livid, somewhere way beyond rational thought.
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I admit that sometimes, I am spectacularly uninformed about the books I read. Take Brigid Kemmerer’s new series which begins with “Defy the Night” and its sequel, “Defend the Dawn.” I was sure that this was a duology, and I was thrilled that I would get to read both books in a row. I was especially psyched to do so while reading the first book and becoming so completely immersed in the fictional kingdom of Kandala, that I didn’t want to wait to find out how it all ended. I really enjoyed meeting and reading about Tessa and Corrick, one an apothecary apprentice and the other the King’s Justice, brother of the king of Kandala, and a feared royal figure.
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B. A. Paris kept the identity of the title character of her last novel, “The Therapist,” a mystery for much of the story. In her latest mystery, “The Prisoner,” we know exactly who the prisoner is. In fact, we read in the first chapter how Amelie has been taken prisoner. While we know that there are many facts that we need to learn, such as why she thought it was her husband who was doing the abduction, we realize that Amelie will share that information either in the chapters labeled “Present,” which detail what is going on currently, or the chapters labeled “Past” which inform us how Amelie ended up in this devastating situation.
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