Books

Peg sells beachfront homes, raises two kids, and holds her life together with duct tape and dark humor. What she can’t manage is menopause, divorce, and an ex who flirts with women half her age. As hot flashes and brain fog upend her world, Peg unravels in hilarious, inconvenient ways, and begins to suspect her breakdown might also be a breakthrough.

When a possible Caravaggio and its curator vanish from a San Francisco museum, cynical lawyer Zara and her scam-prone sister Lilly — two seasoned, sharp-tongued sleuths — give chase from California to a barn in Alsace, a wartime journal in hand.

Opinionated Holocaust survivor Goldie Mandell, marooned in an assisted-living facility, fakes ailments to audition Jewish-doctor husbands for her brilliant PhD granddaughter — who has ideas of her own. An unapologetically Jewish comedy about a matriarch who refuses to be sidelined.

A standalone novella set between books two and three. Flygirl and Fuerte bring the Unusual Cases Unit’s Good Will Tour to a Springfield hospital close to Flygirl’s heart, but the visit is upended when a desperate woman, denied experimental treatment for her wife’s cancer, forces the heroes to choose between good publicity and saving lives.

Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby is content with her quiet life until her granddaughter gives her a hearing trumpet — and she overhears her family plotting to pack her off to a sinister retirement home run by a religious cult. What follows is a gleefully surreal adventure of secret societies, a winking Abbess, and an apocalyptic upheaval, with a deaf, bearded, irrepressible old woman at its center. Leonora Carrington’s cult classic is a wild, funny celebration of female old age as a time of liberation rather than decline.

Dr. Jen Gunter cuts through menopause misinformation with science, humor, and feminist fire. Tackles HRT, bone health, cardiovascular risk, and medical neglect of menopausal women.

Emily Pollifax is a 60-year-old widow and garden club member who, bored with her safe life, applies to the CIA on impulse — and is accidentally sent on a real mission to Albania. Dorothy Gilman’s beloved series began in 1966 and ran for decades: a cheerful, enduring celebration of older women as adventurers, not bystanders.

Four short stories slip into the gaps of the Menopausal Superheroes series, revealing what came before, after, and alongside the novels. Fuerte confesses his transition, the Lizard Woman hunts a vanished friend, and Flygirl faces a wedding and a daring rescue. Heroism, it turns out, comes at any age or stage of life.

Lottie Jones is seventy-five, retired, and — as far as her bingo friends know — perfectly ordinary. What they don’t know is that Lottie is a retired serial killer who long ago changed her name and vanished into small-town life. When a dogged young journalist turns up asking about a string of unsolved cases, Lottie’s quiet retirement is suddenly, dangerously over. A sharp, blackly funny thriller.