Books

Stella Fosse’s smart, sexy novel drops three accomplished women scientists — a biology professor, a chemist, and a patent-lawyer/engineer — into the San Francisco biotech scene, where they discover they’ve all been dating the same charming con man, a fraudster stealing their research along with their hearts. Comparing notes, they reach one conclusion: getting rich is the best revenge. First Wives Club meets The Witches of Eastwick, with older women firmly in charge of the story.

A prequel to Dakota Blues, exploring Karen Grace’s earlier life and the career and marriage pressures that precede her midlife road trip.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie spent forty years as assassins for an elite outfit called the Museum. When their long-awaited retirement cruise turns out to be a setup — the organization has marked them for death — the four women, now in their sixties, turn their decades of skill against their former employers. A sharp, funny thriller that treats being underestimated as older women as the ultimate weapon.

On New Year’s Eve 1984, 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish—once the highest-paid advertising woman in America as R.H. Macy’s star copywriter—sets out on a ten-mile walk across Manhattan, revisiting the places and choices of a remarkable life. Inspired by the real-life poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, Kathleen Rooney’s novel is a witty, defiant portrait of a woman who refuses to shrink with age.

When a parent’s attack sends traumatized teacher Chelsea Garden fleeing home to the California foothills, her life tangles with a beleaguered principal and an old flame. Following three educators at different stages, it’s a novel about the calling of teaching and the courage to change course.

Why it’s here: One of its three educators is a veteran principal in the last chapter of her career, weighing reinvention in her later working years — an older woman’s story threaded through an ensemble.

In Edinburgh’s COVID-lockdown spring of 2020, cold-case detective DCI Karen Pirie learns of an unfinished manuscript by a recently dead crime novelist — one whose plot reads like a blueprint for the real, unsolved disappearance of a university student. As Karen digs, she uncovers a spiralling game of betrayal and revenge where lies are indistinguishable from truth. The Queen of Crime delivers one of her most fiendishly clever Karen Pirie cases yet.

Why it’s here: A genre thriller rather than a book about aging, but its lead is a seasoned, midlife woman investigator — competence and command held by an older woman at the center of the story.

Laid off from her tech job, Marianne returns to her dicey Kansas City neighborhood to find that, as a middle-aged woman, age works against her — and a mugging pushes her toward starting over. Irreverent and human.

A dual-timeline mystery moving between a 1936 archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and the glamour of the 1978 Met Gala. Charlotte Cross, now a Metropolitan Museum curator, is pulled back toward the tragedy and buried secrets she fled decades earlier when a priceless Egyptian artifact vanishes — and a long-dormant curse seems to stir.

Why it’s here: One of its two leads, Charlotte, is a woman in her sixties reckoning with a long-buried past and quietly mentoring a much younger colleague — an older-woman protagonist at the heart of a glossy historical mystery.