Five police cars with flashing lights blocked the southern portion of a major intersection. Broken glass, debris and twisted metal spread as far as the eye could see. Partial remains of a horribly disfigured SUV sat on a flat bed. A mangled sedan was on its side in the middle of the pavement.

News reports said an SUV with four passengers ran a ...Read more

We’ve all read a mystery featuring the dreaded curtain-twitcher, a beady eye sweeping the street, the busybody, the local gossip, the old lady asking too many pertinent questions for comfort. The nosy neighbor is instantly recognizable and integral to the mystery yet is often an overlooked character. They’re frequently the catalyst to the ...Read more

Author Erin Van Der Meer gained insider perspective and in-depth experience as a journalist, which served her well in writing the bitingly satirical debut novel, "The Scoop."

It’s an irresistible, stay-up-late, guilty reading pleasure about protagonist Frankie Miller, a recently unemployed journalist weighed down by multiple rejections from ...Read more

George Washington is literally in the “pages of history.” A book on the coffee table has money hanging out of it — not play money, real money, as in a $1 bill.

I know in an instant the book belongs to a 12-year-old granddaughter.

The girl is an avid reader. She won the “Reader Award” in her class three times last year which ...Read more

There’s a moment early in "Icefall" where an Alaska state trooper pulls open the door of a stranded Amazon delivery van and finds the driver catatonic, frozen in place with Sinatra still playing softly on the radio. It’s a small, eerie image, and it tells you everything about what this book does well: take something mundane, drop it into the...Read more

Girl begins to hate job.

Girl quits job.

Girl goes to college for the experience and degree she never had.

Girl matches wits with professor.

Girl and professor… might… like… each other?

Though this is an extremely simplified summary of "Extracurricular" by Rachel Lynn Solomon, if you’re interested in forbidden romance and age-gap ...Read more

Our nightly dinner routine goes like this: I cook dinner and the husband sets the table. Last night we had Panera napkins, the night before we had Subway napkins. We have a drawer full of cloth napkins, but he prefers to save those until we’ve used all the extras that fast food places stuff in the bag with our order.

Sometimes he goes to the ...Read more

When I set out to write "Wayward Girls," I was pulled into the Vietnam era. My childhood memories centered around the nightly news with Walter Cronkite. I wasn’t really focused on the texture of daily life during that seismic decade: the music, the grief, the quality of American restlessness and the way ordinary people were affected by the ...Read more

Decades ago, there was a story in Time magazine (Page 98, 1965) about a family who survived getting lost in the desert by drinking water from the car radiator and eating crayons. When that issue arrived at our house, my parents must have talked about the broken-down car, the 124-degree temperatures, and the way the kids buried themselves in the ...Read more

The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.

Although many families strive to share these responsibilities, research has consistently found that mothers...Read more

Years ago, when women only a few years older than I am now announced they quit cooking, I silently judged them. I would think to myself, “How in the world do you just stop cooking?”

I get it now. They were tired — tired of chicken, tired of ground beef, tired of pork and tired of salad after salad after salad.

If a judge were to sentence...Read more

Grief does not always behave like an ending. Sometimes it acts more like a ride that refuses to stop: the same drops and turns, the same sickening return to the place where everything irrevocably changed.

In the latest entry to his “Life and Living” series, "Roller Coasters: The Life Kind," Joseph M. Lenard builds a short, intensely ...Read more

If "Murder at the Hotel Orient" were a film, it would be given an “R” if not an “NC-17” rating, as it is a quite naughty, although highly entertaining, murder mystery that would be unsuitable for church or library-based book clubs. The dedication attests to this:“For Mr. Husson, my fourth-grade teacher, who made me promise to dedicate ...Read more

We’ve hit a rough patch over mowing the lawn this summer. The husband is temporarily sidelined with a knee injury and I cheerfully and enthusiastically (a slight exaggeration) volunteered to do the mowing.

We are now engulfed in turf wars. My mowing abilities are under intense scrutiny. The man has high standards. I call him the Sodfather.

...Read more

Kristin Casey‘s "Casey Dancer" takes on subject matter most memoirists would soften or sanitize: a return to stripping at 39 after a stalled real estate career, a decade of dating in sobriety and an eventual pivot into professional companionship work. Casey refuses to flinch from any of it.

What makes the memoir sing is Casey’s voice — ...Read more

Some thrillers begin with a crime scene. "Dawn Before Darkness" begins with a woman trying to end a relationship without angering the man on the other end of the phone. That choice — careful, almost ordinary — tells readers exactly what kind of danger Liz Lazarus is interested in. Not the kind that announces itself all at once, but the kind ...Read more

When my husband was asked if he would help teach twin granddaughters how to parallel park, he immediately yelled, “Yes!” If there was a parallel parking competition, my husband could take first place — unless our son entered the competition, then he’d take first place.

Our son lived in Chicago for 10 years and none of his apartment ...Read more

It’s often assumed that to write a good memoir, a writer must have something happen to them. Something big, juicy, and traumatic. Something unbelievable that really happened to you. Emily LaBarge is here to critique this idea.

In her memoir, "Dog Days," LaBarge challenges the idea that writing a ‘trauma narrative’ is an act of healing, ...Read more

"Fast and Fastidious" is an absolutely smashing and highly entertaining genre-defying first novel by R.M. Caldwell, a pseudonym for New Zealand theater director and escape room puzzle designer.

The author has described it as a “mash-up of 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Fast and the Furious.'” Set in 1810 Regency England amid the Napoleonic ...Read more

My philosophy concerning a garden is the same as my philosophy toward dessert — there’s always room for a little more.

It didn’t take long this spring before I realized I was sowing too many seeds in too little space. Then a light bulb flashed and I thought, “Why not go vertical?” I could just coax everything to latch onto big swaths ...Read more