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 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.

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.

After a New Hampshire car accident leaves wolf biologist Luke Warren in a vegetative state, his estranged gay son Edward flies home from Thailand and finds himself in legal combat with his teenage sister Cara over whether to remove their father's life support.

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.