WickedGirl's Book Notes

When food poisoning strikes an entire wedding party, the only two people who can use the honeymoon trip are the bride's sister and the groom's brother - who can't stand each other.

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.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning third novel: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives the bombing of the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother, walks out of the rubble with Carel Fabritius's tiny 1654 painting of a chained goldfinch, and spends the next fourteen years carrying it from Park Avenue to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, alongside the most unforgettable problem child in recent fiction.

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.

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.