Happy Friday, all!

It’s a wonderfully stormy day here in New York right now (I do so enjoy a good rainy fall day), and all I want to do is read Simone St. James’s The Book of Cold Cases, which magically zapped itself onto my Kindle last night– but I’ve got just two chapters (and an Epilogue) left to write of the new book, so I’ve promised myself I’ll try to stick it out and finish my book before treating myself to Simone’s.

The struggle is real.

Meanwhile, despite preschooler quarantine and deadline brain fog, it’s been a wonderful reading week.  I’ve been chain-reading my way through Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious series, which is a bit like The Westing Game spread over four books with many more dead bodies.  Set between the 1930s and the present day, it revolves around a series of unsolved murders at a boarding school founded by an eccentric millionaire– and the present day student who’s determined to solve both the cold cases and the new deaths that have followed her attempts to look into the old ones.  This week I gobbled up books two and three, The Vanishing Staircase and The Hand on the Wall.

I also had the privilege of an advance read of Maya Rodale’s upcoming historical novel about the notorious Nellie Bly, The Mad Girls of New York, a lively reimagining of Nellie Bly’s first and most daring stunt: infiltrating Blackwell’s Insane Asylum as a patient.  What makes a person take that kind of risk?  Mad Girls gives us a look into what made Nellie Bly who she was– and the lengths to which women had to go to be taken seriously in the boys’ club of nineteenth century journalism.

What have you been reading this week?