WickedGirl's Book Notes

Lisa J. Shultz writes from the other side of three downsizing events in five years - her own post-divorce move out of a large home, plus the back-to-back jobs of clearing out her late father's and mother's houses - and turns the experience into a compassionate, framework-driven guide to letting go of physical, digital, and emotional clutter.

The third Under Suspicion novel: five years after bride-to-be Amanda Pierce vanished the night of her pre-wedding celebration at a luxury Palm Beach resort, television producer Laurie Moran reopens the cold case for her cold-case show - reuniting the wedding party, including the fiance who has since married one of Amanda's own bridesmaids, to find out whether the runaway bride ran or was made to disappear.

To pay for a lifetime of medical care for her six-year-old daughter Willow, who has severe osteogenesis imperfecta, Charlotte O'Keefe sues her best friend - Willow's obstetrician - for wrongful birth, forcing her to testify in open court that she would have terminated the pregnancy had she known.

Nobel laureate José Saramago's final novel sends the Bible's first murderer time-traveling through Genesis and beyond - witnessing Abraham, Sodom, the Tower of Babel, Jericho, Job, and Noah's Ark - in a sustained, blasphemous prosecution of the God of the Old Testament.

A week before her wedding to Butch Dixon, Sheriff Joanna Brady is hit with two cases at once - her octogenarian neighbor Clayton Rhodes is found dead in his garage, and a woman freshly paroled for killing her husband is murdered, leaving her half-Apache fifteen-year-old daughter Lucy Ridder on the run with a red-tailed hawk and the diskette her father left her.

A memoir of growing up in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia, surviving an alcoholic, drug-dealing father, falling into her own cycles of abuse, and finding a path out through Berea College and graduate school.