WickedGirl's Book Notes

An Ancestry.com match arrives in the inbox of a woman who has spent forty-plus years pretending the baby she gave up for adoption in 1964 never existed - and Cheryl Strayed traces, in a tight short story for Amazon's Out of Line collection, what happens when a teenager named Geraldine Waters has to integrate the life she actually lived with the one she's been telling.

Russian-Kazakhstani guide Anatoli Boukreev's firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster - co-written with G. Weston DeWalt, published the same year as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and offering the Mountain Madness team's perspective on the storm that killed eight climbers and the three trips into it that Boukreev made alone to bring three of his clients back alive.

When a Cheviot Hills couple unearths an old hospital supply box with an infant skeleton from the early 1950s, then a nanny is found shot in a nearby park beside more recent infant bones picked clean and coated in beeswax, Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis follow two trails - one back to a 1950s pediatric nurse and a doctor in a rare Duesenberg, the other into the gated estate of movie stars Donny Rader and Prema Moon.

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 closing volume of Greg Iles's Natchez Burning trilogy puts Dr. Tom Cage on trial for the murder of Viola Turner - his Black nurse, his decades-long lover, the mother of a son he never publicly acknowledged - while his son Penn Cage tries to defend a father who refuses to defend himself.

A multi-timeline Louisiana novel that braids Josephine - born into slavery, a farm-owning widow in 1924, befriended by a white neighbor whose husband joins the Klan - with her biracial great-granddaughter Ava, who in 2017 New Orleans moves in with her wealthy white grandmother Martha and finds the arrangement curdling into something dangerous.