Women’s History Month: Mystery and Suspense Novels

Celebrate Women’s History Month with mystery and suspense novels by women writers. Each of these books will keep you on edge until the final page. These novels feature nuanced characters, complex plots, and clues to the reasons the characters behave as they do. It’s been a strange meteorological winter in South Suburban Chicago. In the last two weeks alone, we’ve had temperatures in the eighties, snow, heavy rains, high winds, and tornadoes felling trees on homes. When the weather forced me inside, I escaped the howling winds by falling into the suspense and intrigue of these mesmerizing stories. 

Guide Me Home: A Highway 59 Novel, Book 3, In this, the last in the stellar trilogy that began with the Edgar Award winner Bluebird, Bluebird highlighting conflicted Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, Darren drinks too much, quits his job, and has a fight with the woman he wants to marry. When his estranged mother shows up with a story about a Black girl, a member of an all-white college sorority, who his mother believes is missing, Darren must decide whether to trust his mother who he thinks is incapable of truth telling. While the plot is gripping, it’s Darren’s inner demons that make this special. Reading the first two in the series isn’t essential, but it will make this one richer. Attica Locke is one of America’s best fiction writers and all her novels are exceptional. GPR, BC (Publication date: 9.3.24)

The Lost House by Melissa Larsen is a chilling Nordic noir. After an accident that leaves her fighting to get off painkillers, Agnes travels to the small Icelandic town where her grandmother is believed to have been killed by Agnes’s beloved grandfather. The unsolved murder of the famous “Frozen Madonna” memorialized with her baby draws Agnes to meet with a true-crime podcast host with the hope of clearing her grandfather’s name. When she arrives, a college student has just disappeared in the snow and could be tied to the forty-year-old case. The eerie Icelandic winter landscape infuses this page-turner with atmosphere. CC (Publication date: 1.14.25)

Marcie R. Rendon is a 73-year-old, enrolled member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Her Cash Blackbear series is set in the early 1970s along the Red River in South Dakota and Minnesota. Finding this series and Cash enlivened my winter.

Murder on the Red River: A Cash Blackbear Mystery, Book 1, by Marcie R. Rendon introduces Cash, a 19-year-old Ojibwe beet truck driver, drinker, and pool hustler who works unofficially with Sheriff Wheaton, who helped rescue her from foster care, in this 1970 tale. When a Native man is stabbed to death, Cash’s visions and ideas help solve the case. This debut offers insight into Native culture. While the abrupt ending surprised me, it made me want to read the next book in the series as soon as possible.  GPR/PP/SN, BC (2017)

Girl Gone Missing: A Cash Blackbear Mystery, Book 2, by Marcie R. Rendon, Sheriff Wheaton has arranged for Cash to enroll at Moorhead State College. School is easy for her and she can continue driving a beet truck at night while trying to figure out the disappearance of a girl in one of her classes. When her older brother, who she can barely remember, shows up with PTSD, she faces a new challenge. Cash, with her intuitive vision, resilience, and intelligence finds her way out of this new dilemma. She is fast becoming one of my favorite characters. Rendon brings authenticity to Cash’s story. GPR/PP/SN, BC (2019)

Sinister Graves: A Cash Blackbear Mystery, Book 3 by Marcie R. Rendon, Cash investigates the death of a Native woman in the flooding of the Red River Valley. Finding a torn piece of a hymn written in English and Ojibwe, Cash looks for clues at a rural, “speaking-in-tongues” church where two small graves lie in the cemetery. Cash connects with the Pastor’s wife and a Native woman dies after giving birth and there’s no sign of her child. Cash’s trauma from foster care and her new vulnerability with a kind caring man make a stellar tale. GPR/PP/SN, BC (2022)

Broken Fields: A Cash Blackbear Mystery: Book 4 by Marcie R. Rendon, Cash is an emotional wreck. She’s drinking too much as the emotional effects of her childhood in foster care and a recent shooting catch up with her. Her discovery of a dead man and a young Native child hiding in a tenant farmhouse leads her into new danger. Rendon compellingly illustrates racism toward Natives via a wealthy farm wife and others. Cash and Wheaton feel like family. I adore them. GPR/PP/SN, BC (Publication date: 3.4.25)

Coming out today is Mrs. Oliver’s Twist: A Quinn McFarland Mystery, Quinn returns from her honeymoon to her job in her family’s funeral home and police ask her to identify the body of her former teacher Mrs. Oliver, but the body isn’t her teacher’s. Soon Quinn gets trapped in Mrs. Oliver’s histrionics and possible criminal connections as Quinn’s husband’s concerns for her safety build. After another body connected to Mrs. Oliver shows up, tension mounts. Clever twists make this book impossible to put down. The second in this series stands alone. CC/GPR

Coming out on Tuesday, April 1 is Heartwood by Amity Gaige, a suspense-filled, literary page-turner that begins when hiker Valerie disappears just 200 miles short of her destination on the Appalachian Trail deep in the woods of Maine. As the novel follows Valerie’s struggles, it picks up the story of Beverly, the trailblazing Maine State Game Warden heading up the search-and-rescue effort, and weaves in the insights of Lena, a wheelchair-bound Connecticut retirement community resident. This novel, like Gaige’s engaging Sea Wife, explores marriage and parental relationships. As Valerie jots down her thoughts while fighting to survive, Gaige shows the healing power of nature and community. The characters’s kindness, strength, and resilience make this a rich and compelling read. GPR/SF/SN, BC

 

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a sumptuous symphony of images, a glittering, slim volume of spectacularly gorgeous sentences on just about every one of its 144 pages. Six astronauts, four men and two women, orbit 250 miles above the earth in a single, 24-hour day during which they experience sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Two of the men are Russian cosmonauts assigned to the toilet marked “Russian Cosmonauts Only.” Nell, the English woman, Chie, the Japanese woman, Shaun, the American, and Pietro, the Italian, frequent the toilet labeled “American, European, and Japanese Astronauts Only” while they look out on an earth with no visible borders, “a rolling invisible globe which knows no possibility of separation.” “The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.”

That there is only a slight plot involving their assigned duties matters little as glimpses of each astronaut contemplating the beauty below them and wondering about the lives they’ve left behind on earth affords a brilliant view of grief, art, faith, kindness, and more than anything: gratitude for the creation they see. 

As the astronauts describe their view, we readers take in the images through their eyes: the nightly light shows, a developing typhoon, “a mass of moon glow, peeling backward as they forge toward its edgeless edge,” and every dawn a “blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it.”

When I started reading Orbital, I found myself so enamored with the poetic images I yearned to hear them spoken aloud. We were experiencing a week of below zero temperatures so I listened as my six new acquaintances circumnavigated this planet while I walked my treadmill and found myself glancing at the sky outside my window with a new appreciation. When the novel concluded, I picked up my iPad and read many of the sentences I’d recently heard with increasing awareness. That this won the 2024 Booker Prize wasn’t surprising.

“The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.” 

As Orbital wends toward its conclusion, the astronauts remind us: “That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.” Thank you, Samantha Harvey.

Summing it Up: Read Orbital to immerse yourself in one of the most beautiful books you’ll ever experience. Listen to it if you can. (It’s available in audio from many libraries via Hoopla.) If you buy the physical book, you’re sure to highlight numerous sentences in this contemplative wonder.

Rating: 5 Stars

Publication Date: December 6, 2023

Category: Fiction, Five Stars, Gourmet, Road Food, Super Nutrition, Sweet Bean Paste, Tapas, Book Club

Author Website: https://www.samanthaharvey.co.uk/ 

Reading Group Guide: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-orbital-by-samantha-harvey 

What Others Are Saying: 

 Chicago Review of Books: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2023/12/05/around-the-world-in-90-minutes-samantha-harveys-orbital/ 

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/16/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-review-the-astronauts-view 

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/samantha-harvey/orbital/

The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/books/review/orbital-samantha-harvey.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare 

The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/25/orbital-samantha-harvey-book-review 

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/9780802161543 

The Sunday Times (U.K.): https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-review-everyday-life-in-a-space-lab-50mqk0wbw 

“One of the most beautiful and poignant novels I have read this year. It seems wholly necessary that a novel about the fragility and glory of our mutual and natural habitat, the Earth, is not even set on it.”  — The Scotsman