The Case of the Murdered Muckraker by Rob Osler

Posted on July 24, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following on the events of The Case of the Missing Maid, Harriet Morrow is working on settling in to her job at the Prescott Detective Agency. It is 1898, Chicago. Harriet is an outlier, as a young woman (just twenty-one years old) employed as a detective – a ‘girl detective,’ they call her. She is also an outlier in her preference for unadorned living, hard work, using her bicycle for transport – not particularly ladylike qualities, especially for her time – and she has recently discovered a preference for wearing men’s clothing. She is attracted to women, and in book one, began a romantic involvement with a young woman named Barbara Wozniak, a Polish immigrant. One of the throughlines of this book and this series is Harriet’s search for a place in a world where she mostly feels like she does not belong, does not live up to expectations. In one of the subplots of her investigation, in fact, Harriet will take to full male drag – a disguise, and a false identity as Harry Dunn. This strategy makes sense from an investigatory standpoint, and takes advantage of her large, sturdy frame. It also doubles as an experiment, and allows her to observe that she does not think of herself as a man nor wish she was one. She wishes rather for a version of womanhood that her society doesn’t recognize. Without putting modern labels on Harriet’s 1898 experiences, this nicely parses some aspects of her sexuality and sexual identity.

But ho, this is a mystery novel. The back blurb tells us that “Rob Osler writes traditional mysteries featuring LGBTQ+ main characters.” While I mostly agree, I think these facets of Harriet’s identity are more than a mere twist on the traditional genre. In The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, we do pursue the murderer of the muckraking journalist, and the evidence of political corruption for which he was killed. But the social issues creeping in there – political corruption, wealth and wage disparities, immigrants’ experiences, working and living conditions, and more – I think play a larger role than the ‘framing elements’ in a knitting mystery or a culinary mystery. I think this is a mystery novel inseparable from its historical setting, and concerned with social-political conditions and change. As well as the character arc of a young woman we would definitely call a lesbian in today’s terms.

Harriet is a delight. She is earnest and serious in her work – admittedly a pure amateur at detective work, but committed to the job, to serving justice, and to making her own way in the world. She is a head of household, providing for her sixteen-year-old brother Aubrey since their parents’ death, and did you catch that Harriet is herself just twenty-one? She and Aubrey’s relationship is not always smooth sailing, but it’s written with compassion for both of their circumstances. Her budding romance, though it doesn’t play a huge role in this story, is also told with nuance – I hope that plot thread will continue to play out. She is developing some meaningful friendships, too: the wealthy, older Pearl gives Harriet an important outlet, and then there is her friend and colleague Matthew, who is also queer. Osler is doing a lot of work with Harriet’s story: the mystery plots, the detective agencies, the social-political time-and-place setting which is super rich, and his main character’s own development, as a queer person and just as a person. It all feels pretty ambitious, but he has it all in hand at this point, by my standards. I can’t wait for book three – as yet unannounced, but surely?!

Rating: 7 sticks of dynamite.

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Misery’s Wife by Joan Tierney

Posted on July 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Misery’s Wife is a lovely, off-kilter fable about family, sisterhood, love, transformation, and humans’ relationship with the rest of the world. It uses repetition and sets of threes in ways that feel familiar to a fairy tale tradition. I think I was expecting something referencing Persephone or Eurydice, but it turns out that Tierney here recasts a Portuguese folktale, with foods, names and language from that culture. I was unfamiliar but still found it all accessible and enjoyable.

We first meet the parents of three sisters. Agueda and Jaco have three girls, and during each pregnancy, Jaco goes on a mini-quest to ease his beloved wife’s discomforts, and each time, this results in the newborn daughter’s allegiance: Adelina is a child of the night and the sea; Borboleta is a child of the day and the sky; and Dores is a child of the wind and rain, “and Misery itself will bend to kiss her feet.” They grow respectively into a young woman who adores all things strange; one who admires and exudes beauty; and one who is mild-tempered and shy, given to daydreams. In a single day, Adelina elopes with the King of the Ocean. Borboleta runs away with the King of the Sky. And Dores declines the offer of the King of Misery, but he abducts her anyway.

Years pass. Agueda and Jaco mourn their three lost daughters. But lo (the book surprises us), there is a fourth, younger sister, a child of luck and fortune. “There was also the mistaken belief, in those early years, that Elixane was in fact a son rather than daughter… these things happen, and are remedied easily enough once the child themself can put voice to the truth.” As Elixane grows into a young woman, she receives three mysterious messages, one from sea, one from sky, and then a final message from the queen of Misery. “She asks that you find her and save her from her king.” As she prepares for this quest, Elixane meets Luck, who has (naturally) followed her all her life; he is accompanied by his sister, Jinx. Off and on, the pair will accompany her as she meets with each sister in turn, and endeavors to rescue Dores from Misery, as well as lifting a curse and generally improving circumstances in the kingdoms of sea and sky, and that of land and humans as well. Misery’s Wife is set in a future world badly damaged by anthropogenic climate change, which, like Elixane’s identity as a trans woman, is treated only glancingly.

I liked this story, although the stretches set in the kingdom of Misery were sometimes hard to read. I liked the representations of the love and devotion of family, of sisters and of friends, as well as the loving marriages (“When you marry someone, you marry their battles, too”), contrasted to Misery’s abuse (“Dores’s skin was pockmarked with bruises… The cat looked at the bruises and then looked at her eyes and said, ‘This is how it starts'”). I found the folk formula – repetitions in threes, quests and codes and riddles – soothing in its familiarity, which did not prevent plot twists. And I loved the decidedly happy ending. By that conclusion, I’d say that despite some comforting framing, Tierney has given us a surprising, thought-provoking fable that I will not soon forget.

Rating: 7 roosters.

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Strangers Behind Closed Doors by Catherine Adel West

Posted on July 10, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent a galley copy of this book by a publisher’s representative in exchange for my honest review.

Giovanni Mason – Gio to her friends – is the chief concierge at one of Chicago’s most exclusive premier hotels, the Ivory. She was the first Black concierge of any kind, let alone chief, and she’s very proud of this accomplishment, even if her mother (a longtime Ivory housekeeper) hoped she’d wind up somewhere different. Detective Redding Stark has followed her father’s path with the Chicago PD. Like Gio, Red is a workaholic, whose commitment to her work has not always proved healthy. She remains preoccupied with the cold cases of five missing women – young Black women, whose disappearances have been far too easily forgotten by the system Red works for. Then a beauty influencer, who also happens to be Gio’s former best friend, vanishes from one of the Ivory’s extra-rarified upper floor rooms, a room now marked by broken glass and blood splatter. Gio fought with Natalie just hours earlier, and now has bruises on her wrists and no memory of a chunk of her evening. But Red suspects the chief concierge is innocent. She believes instead that Natalie’s case is linked to the others.

The two form, in fits and starts, a mistrustful alliance, motivated by concern that Natalie may be alive and in danger, wanting to prove Giovanni’s innocence, and wishing for justice for women who look like them. There are few people in either woman’s life whom they can trust. Instead, the Ivory Hotel and the Chicago Police Department are filled with politicians, social climbers, and the very rich. In chasing the truth, as they reveal plots, corruption, and double-crossings, Gio and Red place themselves in great danger.

Strangers Behind Closed Doors offers intrigue and action scenes by the truckload. Amid luxury suites, fine dining establishments and neighborhood classics, flower shops and cozy homes, fight scenes and family drama unfold. The impulse toward friendship between Gio and Red feels real, and poignant, even as both are limited by their own trauma. I was definitely propelled by the twisty-turny plot, which kept offering surprises. It was not completely without unbelievable details, but that’s not too unusual in the genre. The background big issue, that the disappearances of women of color are overlooked, is a point well taken. West’s Chicago is well done: it’s not a city I claim great familiarity with, but I recognized some landmarks, and it felt fully realized. I never stopped rooting for the two stars, even in their flaws.

Rating: 7 photographs.

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Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit by Amy Stewart (audio)

Posted on June 29, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Here we have book four in the Kopp Sisters series, and I think I’m more and more bought in with each one. There’s a trajectory here. As ever, I’m not sure how much of it is about differences in the books, and how much is me. I always find this a fascinating question, about beers and mountain bike trails and everything else: how much has it changed, and how much is my taste buds / skill level / preferences? We can never know. Thank you for making it through that moment of philosophy, and now the novel.

If anything, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit takes a step further from the mystery or puzzle sort of plot, and (while absolutely telling a story about Deputy Kopp and her work) considers the time and time in which it is set.

…the sheriff maintained his posture of unruffled detachment.

I, on the other hand, was the very opposite of unruffled. John Courter was, in every way, a small-minded, petty, vindictive man unworthy of public office. I didn’t care to stand at the edge of a crowd and listen to him hurl insults and lies at us.

What made it worse, though, was that the crowd seemed to love it. It was an uncertain time in Bergen County: there was labor unrest in the factories, a mistrust of immigrants who might be German sympathizers, and the very real fear that a munitions depot might go up like so many crates of firecrackers at the hands of secret agents of the Kaiser. And most of all, there was the absolute terror of war – a war we surely couldn’t avoid much longer.

These people were looking for an enemy, and John Courter had one on offer.

Constance has been at work as a sheriff’s deputy for a while now. She’s been involved in investigations and arrests, including wrestling in the streets with male criminals (she would be affronted that that even needs pointing out). She’s cared for the female inmates at the jail, which includes basic food-and-shelter sort of needs as well as something we might call counseling, and questioning. She has pioneered a system of probation that (with the help of a friendly judge) allows women whose crimes are minor, or that shouldn’t count as crimes at all, to keep their freedom, work, and contribute to society. In a world that still isn’t sure women should do this sort of work, she has not only had some real successes, she’s also gotten to contemplate and enact improvements in the system. She’s the breadwinner for her household of three adult women, with her sister Norma and her ‘sister’ (biological daughter) Fleurette. And in that last role, she has also undertaken some thoughtful changes and modernizations. All of this is arguably made possible by her supportive boss, Sheriff Heath.

Thus the great conflict of this novel: the sheriff is an elected position, and Heath is term-limited. A change is coming for Constance either way, but the two men running for election offer rather different outcomes for her: bad and worse. The shift away from police work and into politics pleases no one – not Sheriff Heath, not Deputy Kopp, and not the reader. But here we are. Constance loves her work, and has found a comfortable place in the world, where she feels good about what she can contribute. In a nutshell, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit is about what she’ll do when continuing on that path is no longer an option. It’s terribly sad, but it’s also heartening to see her come to terms. Not all reviewers agree with me, but I really liked the ending, and I can’t wait to see what she’ll do in book five.

Rating: 8 first names.

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Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions by Amy Stewart (audio)

Posted on June 19, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I continue to feel deeply involved with the indefatigable Miss Kopp and her earnest pursuit of betterment for herself, her sisters, and her community.

Following closely on the events of Lady Cop Makes Trouble, Constance Kopp efforts at the Bergen County Jail to keep her female inmates safe, in line, and pointed toward rehabilitation. She continues to enjoy a good relationship with Sheriff Heath, whose progressive ideals inspire her. It’s 1916, and times are changing: much of Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions deals with the options of young women to make their own way in the world, in terms of work and housing. (Other lifestyle choices remain yet more controversial.) Edna Heustis, for instance, left home to go to work in a munitions factory, patriotically hoping to contribute to the war effort as her brothers prepare to go fight in France. She lives in a respectable (strict) boarding house for young factory-working women like herself – and yet is arrested for waywardness, because her mother would rather she stay home and keep house. Minnie Davis left home with the (perhaps slightly less righteous) ambition of having a little fun and getting out from under her parents’ thumb. Shacked up with a young man she’s not married to, working in a mill and drinking at night, Minnie is likewise subject to criminal charges, just because she’s interested in flexing the moral boundaries of her day. (Minnie and Constance both repeat the question: why isn’t the young man locked up for ‘waywardness’ or ‘moral depravity’ as well?)

Constance feels strongly about defending the rights of women like Edna and Minnie to find their own paths in a changing world. But when it’s Fleurette who wants to leave home and work for a living, and maybe have a little fun – well. Constance’s values will be put to the test. And Norma is even less ready to entertain looser restraints on the youngest Kopp sister.

Norma’s lips worked furiously over her composition. From time to time a word escaped: presumptuous, unconscionable, iniquitous, abhorrent. She took a breath and continued: indecorous, opportunistic, unprincipled, opprobrious.

Fleurette had been right not to breathe a word of her plans to her sisters. Nothing – not a tour with a theater troupe, and certainly not an offer of marriage – stood a chance against Norma’s formidable vocabulary of refusal.

It’s one of Amy Stewart’s greatest strengths that she can tell such complex, fascinating, moving stories about history and women’s rights, alongside absolutely laugh-out-loud funny moments, perfectly played by audio-narrator Christina Moore.

I love the interplay of serious (and true historical) issues with family dynamics and simple human struggle. These moments can be both funny and serious.

Constance had grown to count on Norma to be that domestic presence who sat in the parlor and disapproved of things. She did not, however, like to find Norma disapproving of things at [Constance’s] place of employment, and wished she knew how to discourage the habit.

I’m still having a riotous good time, and simultaneously, enjoying considering some hefty issues through the lens of these expertly drawn mysteries. Three cheers for Amy Stewart, and on to the next one.

Rating: 8 trinkets.

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Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart (audio)

Posted on June 8, 2026 by pagesofjulia

It’s been years since I listened to Girl Waits with Gun, and I guess I’d forgotten all about it*, but I’m so happy to have now rediscovered Stewart’s work. I love Constance Kopp: subversive, contrary, big and strong, determined to do the work she sees fit. As we left her, Miss Kopp lives in the New Jersey countryside with her two sisters: no-nonsense Norma, who loves her carrier pigeons and has strong opinions about everything but rarely leaves the farm; and Fleurette, young, flighty, fashion-forward, and yearning to live in a wider world. (Also, Fleurette is not in fact a sister but Constance’s own daughter, although I still don’t think she knows it.)

Lady Cop Makes Trouble offers us two main mystery plotlines, but also importantly follows the home lives of the Kopp sisters and of Sheriff Heath. Following the events of that earlier book, Constance is proud to be employed as a sheriff’s deputy in her rural county. She was promised a badge, but that’s now in jeopardy because, predictably, the 1915 New Jersey public (not least, the sheriff’s wife) is not sure about having a “lady” deputy (or a “girl” one), let alone Constance’s take on the job, which involves wrestling suspects to the grimy ground, whether in New Jersey or New York City. It’s quite unfortunate, then, that Constance happens to be the one on duty guarding an inmate who escapes from custody – never mind that he’d faked a debilitating injury and was in the hospital, during a power outage and a mass casualty event, and the (male) deputy who was supposed to be on duty had defected. It just goes to prove to those who wanted it proved, that Constance is unfit. Worse, it goes a ways toward making Constance question her fitness. She ramps up her devotion to the job in hunting down the fugitive – sometimes crossing over into insubordination in her enthusiasm. I found it interesting to see the conflict between following orders and Doing Right, especially as Sheriff Heath has always been a sympathetic character. And here we see him face some difficulties of his own.

The manhunt is the main mystery-plot-driver, but there is also a secondary puzzle of a case involving one of the female prisoners Constance is in charge of, a woman whose murder confession is being questioned. I like this second line for the foundation I think it might offer for future books.

*I had also forgotten that I wasn’t a huge fan of that first book, apparently, but I’m glad I did forget this. Something changed – about the books, about me? – and I was on board with the pace this time around. I can’t explain to you whether it got snappier or I got more patient, but this reader and this series have come into sync. (Stewart did bring this one down to 320 pages.) A benefit to my long hiatus: there are now seven books in the series! Oh, good.

I was once again pleased by Christina Moore’s narration, and appreciated the same things I did in that earlier review: historical setting and detail; some very funny exchanges, between the Kopp sisters but also Constance with many others; characters; and now pacing. I am already on to book three, with no more qualms.

Rating: 7 nights in a cell.

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A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman

Posted on April 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This twist on the historical romantic drama considers a lady’s maid, the valet she falls for, and the wider world for which she yearns.

A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother; Daughter’s Keeper; Love and Treasure) is a captivating historical drama, an appealing romance, and a story of political awakening, cleverly packaged as a novel of manners. This shapeshifter reads as an engaging and witty work of escapism until it turns to more serious-minded concerns, while never losing its charm. Set in English country estates and the grimy city of London in the 19th century, the rollicking narrative ranges from frivolous upper-class parties and fancy dress to the literal and metaphorical dirty laundry that the service class must process.

Alice Lockey, the daughter of a tenant farmer, has done well for herself, working her way up to the position of lady’s maid to Lady Jemima, the silly, indulged elder daughter of a lord. Alice is skilled, intelligent, and eager to learn and to better herself; she hasn’t decided what that will mean but is reluctant to follow her mother’s advice to pursue marriage as a highest aim. Then she meets Charlie, a similarly above-average valet (also having climbed above his humble beginnings) to a viscount. Charlie and Alice tumble into the meager courtship that they can sneak on their half-days off, but they wish for more. Quickly realizing that their employers’ marriage is the only route to their own, they determine to set up Lady Jemima–infatuated with another man, who is a bit of a rake–and the deeply eccentric Lord Wynstowe. This is a tall order, but the young lovers are highly motivated and well positioned for persuading.

Even as their schemes near fruition, however, Alice learns and yearns and grows. A reader (unusual for her class, but encouraged by Lady Jemima’s iconoclastic spinster aunt), she encounters pamphlets by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Questions of class reflect directly on her life and Charlie’s; certain versions of feminism seem aimed at her lady’s class rather than her own, but Alice wonders what the suffrage movement might do for even a servant girl. Between sewing ribbons and lace onto her lady’s latest dresses and washing her foul undergarments, running her errands and helping her dress, Alice considers the various lives she might wish for, if she were able to choose for herself.

A Perfect Hand works subtly on several levels, exulting in the details of the Victorian setting (dress, diet, and indignities), exclaiming over Alice and Charlie’s sympathetic romance, and pressing the exceptional heroine toward her best and truest self. Waldman even exposes a fun and poignant final surprise in the narrator’s identity. With a nod to Jane Austen but a firm focus on the servant class, this versatile novel will entertain and stay with readers long past its final pages.

This review originally ran in the March 31, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 seedcakes.

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When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (audio)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I don’t recall where I got this title from, but I loved this book, and am grateful to whatever review or list sent it my way. Also to my lovely partner who gifted it to me for the long drive from Texas to West Virginia.

When Women Were Dragons: Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green–Physicist, Professor, Activist. Still Human. A memoir, of sorts is a living, breathing tale, ever expanding, filled with metaphor that reshapes itself with the reader’s interpretation. It opens with a strange letter from a Nebraska housewife in 1898 to her mother, shortly before the woman spontaneously dragoned. Next we have an excerpt from the opening statement given by Dr. Henry Gantz to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1957. Then we get into the first-person narration of Alex Green, who will tell most of this story, with brief insertions mostly from Dr. Gantz’s work – bit of an epistolary format. (The audiobook is narrated by Kimberly Farr, as Alex Green, and Mark Bramhall, as Dr. Gantz, which I thought was a great choice.) “I was four years old when I first met a dragon. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t think she’d understand.”

I think this must be right around 1950. Alex grows up in small-town Wisconsin, in a pretty 1950s world: there are many things we just don’t talk about, including cancer, menstruation and most aspects of girlhood and womanhood, what to expect on one’s wedding night, diversity in sexual orientation and gender expression, our feelings, and dragons. When Alex is a little girl, her mother goes away for some time – months – and no one explains or even acknowledges the change; likewise when her mother returns, gaunt, weak, different (she doesn’t even smell right). The reader understands better than little-girl Alex when her mother’s chest is glimpsed, missing breasts, two scars like smiles. This world is recognizably our own except for the dragons. Women in this world can dragon (that’s a verb), or become dragons, at which point they sometimes eat their husbands (this seems to happen frequently with very unlikeable, not to say abusive, husbands) before flying away. Dragoning is a poorly understood phenomenon because, as with much that is female or feminine, society judges it too shameful to examine, and science mostly averts its gaze. Dr. Gantz is a rare exception: he believes in the scientific mandate to learn, whatever truths are revealed. Biology should never be shameful. His research articles and responses to an oppressive world are useful seasonings to this story, and he is himself a delightful character, alongside the heroic librarian Mrs. Gyzinska.

And oh, Alex’s auntie Marla, a wonderful woman who comes and cares for her while her mother is away in cancer treatment, a big powerful woman who flies airplanes during the war and works as a car mechanic and wears men’s clothes and takes very little shit, and who we lose to the Mass Dragoning of 1955. When Marla dragons, she leaves behind an infant daughter, Alex’s cousin Beatrice, who from here on is raised as Alex’s sister. Such is the gaslighting of Alex’s family and world that she learns to really believe – almost – that she has no aunt, that Beatrice has always been her sister. (Echoes of 1984. We have always been at war with Eastasia.) And boy, the time Alex has raising her younger sister, Beatrice, a delightful dragon of a child if there ever was one.

Despite all I’ve just thrown at you, I’ve barely scraped the surface of this remarkable novel. It contains many stories and many layers, much that is very recognizable from our ‘real’ world, and lots of potential metaphors to ponder. I wondered at different times if dragoning were a metaphor for menstruation; for puberty; for “un-american activities” (certainly, HUAC seems to conflate them); for simply being independent, self-determining, and female (except that those who dragon are overwhelmingly but not universally girls and women). This story tackles the way we handle difference, and especially gender, sexuality, and gender expression. It contains such maddening (if entirely realistic) renderings of sexism that it was sometimes hard to listen to. It contains transcendent moments of personal discovery, joyful academic inquiry, love and coming-of-age, and some lovely iterations of family and built family, which I always appreciate. “Sometimes,” confides Alex at an advanced age, “the expansive nature of family takes my breath away.” There is such good fun; I especially liked the line “If that dragon was hoping for sympathy, she was crying in front of the wrong teenager,” which I got to share with my favorite dragon-loving teenager. It considers the looping of time and relationships. It’s got science and wonder, a bit like A Tale for the Time Being, but I liked this better. I’m a bit over the moon about it, and am giving it a perfect score. Also, I loved the audio format, with the one caveat that I wish I could pull more quotations that I loved.

Do give it a go, and let me know what you think.

Rating: 10 military-issued boots.

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Elektra by Jennifer Saint (audio)

Posted on December 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I made a 2,500 round-trip drive recently, so check out a few *audiobooks* for the first time in quite a while. I had a blast with them!

I’d been just recently telling a friend my paraphrased-from-memory version of the curse on the house of Atreus, so when I went looking for an audiobook, I was delighted to find Jennifer Saint’s Elektra, read for us by Beth Eyre, Jane Collingwood, and Julie Teal. (It looks like I put this one on a wish list based upon my interview with Claire North aka Catherine Webb.) I liked that this was a retelling with, if you will, a modern angle – told from the points of view of the women – but it is not a modern retelling; it’s still set in the ancient Greek and Trojan world. The three women who narrate their intersecting stories are Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Elektra. The latter gives her name to the novel, perhaps, because she is the one who survives to its end.

I think this is the most in-depth telling I’ve encountered of Cassandra’s story, in which she, a princess of Troy, becomes a priestess in Apollo’s temple and undergoes the conflicting honor and agony of his gift of prophecy, and his curse that no one will ever believe her (always correct) prophecies. She then sees her city destroyed – sees it in advance and experiences it in real time – and is taken as a war prize by the Greek king-of-kings Agamemnon (who, in all tellings I’ve ever found, comes across as a consistently unlikeable man). Her life ends not long after his does, although with a little different nuance in this version.

[Here, an aside. These events, lying somewhere between myth and, in some cases, *possible* history, originate in an oral tradition. There are many versions, but all are translated at this point across both language and transcription; there are many retellings, but it seems there can be no single, original, authoritative one. I like how freeing this is: there is no reliably “correct” version of Cassandra’s story, or any of them, which I think offers a liberty to riff.]

Clytemnestra has always been a puzzler. She kills her husband (using some deceit, and after cheating on him); she has usurped power in a man’s world; many, especially the more traditional versions, paint her in an unsympathetic light. More modern perspectives point out that one of her greatest crimes may be that she holds power with confidence – she possesses traits that tend to read positively when they belong to men. And it’s not always remembered and pointed out that she kills her husband because he killed their firstborn daughter – sacrificed her to the gods for the fair winds needed to sail for Troy. That sacrifice, or murder, is in turn painted differently depending on whether the storyteller believes in the gods’ need for sacrifice (and the Greeks’ need to sail for Troy). What is one young woman’s life against glory in battle for all the greatest warriors ever, etc., etc. The same dual and dueling perspectives apply to Clytemnestra’s famous sister, Helen of Sparta / Helen of Troy. There the great question will forever be: did Paris abduct her? Or did she leave her husband and run away with another by choice? Victim, or whore? (A shocking number of ambiguities in Greek myth turn on the question of sexual consent.) Clytemnestra remains a difficult character in Jennifer Saint’s version of her story. Her grief over the loss of Iphigeneia is sympathetic; her desire for revenge feels righteous, if perhaps bloodthirsty. But because of the third point of view Saint gives us, we’re also aware of how fully she orphans her remaining three children in her singlemindedness about the one she’s lost.

Elektra is herself single-minded and bloodthirsty, and this is the essence of the curse on the house of Atreus: each killing, meant to set right the last, only sets the next one in motion. Clytemnestra means to avenge Iphigeneia by killing Agamemnon; Elektra feels it necessary to avenge Agamemnon by killing Clytemnestra. She has lived her life in father-worship, mostly in the absence of that father (and again, I’ve not read of anybody who spent time around Agamemnon and liked him). It’s notable to me that both Clytemnestra and Elektra show signs of finding some nuance, rather late in the game for it to make a difference. But I think that’s the curse again, inexorable.

I liked the choice, on audio, of three different readers for the three parts. I’m not sure I ever learned the voices well enough to tell from the first few syllables who we were with, but the changes always nudged me to listen for context clues (which take no time at all).

I always appreciate revisiting these stories that I’ve been taking in, in various forms, for most of my life. I love that they are both familiar and always new – every version offers a fresh perspective or a new take, and each encounter I have enriches the later ones; it’s such a genuine pleasure for me to spend time in this known but changing ancient world. ‘Pleasure’ is a strange word, of course: these stories are full of blood and death and rape (so much rape). But I seem to have a great appetite for the big themes, the continual question of predetermination and personal choice, these gods who are capricious and silly and lustful and jealous and awfully human, although immortal. It’s just always captured me. I loved Jennifer Saint’s contribution to my understanding of these stories.

Rating: 7 old dogs.

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Her One Regret by Donna Freitas

Posted on September 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young mother confesses regret in this satisfying, dynamic mystery that is also a rousing conversation starter about an experience of motherhood still treated as taboo.

Donna Freitas’s Her One Regret explores what one of her characters calls “the last taboo of motherhood.” At once a rocket-paced crime tale of suspense and a thoughtful examination of cultural dictates about motherhood, this novel of women’s lives and relationships excels as both entertainment and a call to difficult but necessary conversations.

In a brief introductory section, readers meet Lucy in the parking lot of a supermarket in Narragansett Beach. On a gorgeous, early fall afternoon, she loads groceries alongside her nine-month-old daughter, Emma. Then begins Part I: “The First 48 Hours.” Lucy has vanished; Emma is found, alone, crying, but perfectly fine, in the parking lot. The small Rhode Island community is horrified, united in a search for the missing mother. But then it is revealed that Lucy had recently confided in her best friend, Michelle, that she regretted having Emma. She had fantasized about staging her own disappearance. The community and the nation erupt in harsh judgment. Is Lucy a kidnapping victim, or on the run? Is she a monster? What do we make of a woman who regrets motherhood?

The rest of Freitas’s narrative jumps between the lives of four local women. Lucy is seen mostly in memory, or as a symbol. Michelle is devastated by her best friend’s disappearance, in love with her own role as mother, but galvanized to defend her friend. Lucy had tried to tell Michelle what she was suffering, but “Michelle did the thing everybody does with mothers: dismiss their feelings as not real. Michelle gaslit Lucy, kept gaslighting her. She hadn’t meant to.” Diana, a retired detective, is drawn to Lucy’s case and its similarities and differences from other vanished women. And then there is Julia, whose baby is the same age as Emma: “Julia keeps waiting for the moment she’ll feel bonded to her son, that miracle other women talk about when connection and unbelievable love will flood her person and overcome the dread, the sadness, the resistance. But it never happens.” Julia, an artist who can no longer bring herself to create, sees herself in Lucy, shares the fantasy of escape, and now watches as the world on social media condemns her parallel self. Her desperation feels like an emergency no one around her will acknowledge.

Freitas (Consent; The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano) relates these lives and quiet–or in Lucy’s case, suddenly very public–struggles with nuance and compassion. Her One Regret is purposefully thought-provoking and a riveting mystery–a masterpiece of duality, not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the September 5, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 sketches.

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