Notable Books

After her sister dies in childbirth, 17-year-old Sarah chooses to become an anchoress who’s shut away in a small chamber connected to a church. There she will spend the rest of her life with a Rule guiding her spiritual practice, two maids tending her needs, and a Confessor listening to her sins. The chamber can’t shut out worries from the outside world or temptations from within. As she struggles to put to death physical desire, we learn why she took vows. Cadwallader’s 13th-century setting accepts a feminist version of church history, where men are brutal and church fathers minimized women’s worth.

The Abbot’s Agreement

Set about 100 years later than The Anchoress, this novel paints an altogether different picture of medieval life. Its protagonist is a surgeon/bailiff who desires to own one of William Tyndale’s Bibles. On his way to Oxford to buy it, he stumbles upon the corpse of a novice from a local abbey. The abbot asks him to discover the murderer. Although the plot meanders, Starr imaginatively constructs the methods a medieval crime solver might have used. He incorporates Tyndale’s theology into the plot, hints at the plague’s devastation, and pictures a husband who loves his wife.

Behind Closed Doors

When Scarlett was 15, she went missing in Greece. Ten years later, cops discover her in England when they raid a brothel. Author Haynes weaves Scarlett’s 10-year-journey—from grooming and abduction to brutalizing and prostitution—into the broader plot involving a female British cop and her special crimes unit. Haynes shows good guys having trouble figuring out love and bad guys who use that vulnerability to prey on the weak. It’s hard to convey the degradation of human trafficking while not making the reader a participant. Haynes comes close in this novel that should be R-rated for language and subject matter.

The Red Road

The prime suspect in an arms smuggling ring is already in prison for murder. When his fingerprints show up at a new murder scene, DI Alex Morrow has to figure out how they got there. She suspects a plot to undermine the arms case, but her investigation into the original murder conviction, which also relied on fingerprints, uncovers evidence of corruption. One plot thread involves a young woman trying to escape her trafficked past. Part police procedural and part psychological study, Mina’s gritty story with R-rated language explores loyalty, guilt, and the way the past continues to affect the present.

Spotlight

Summer beach reading is a publishing genre aimed at women and revolving around family/love—and here are two recent novels in that category.

The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson features 42-year-old Kitty Miller, a single career woman who co-owns a bookstore with her best friend in 1962 Denver. She begins having vivid dreams in which she’s married to a lovely man named Lars and has three children, one with autism. Seeing how Swanson resolves the tension between the two worlds provides the novel’s narrative lift.

The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos features half sisters who have very different relations with a brilliant father. After being estranged from her father for 17 years, Taisie Cleary reconnects with him, her high-school-aged half sister, and her true love—the boy she dumped because of her father’s disapproval. The novel capitalizes on the reader’s desire for a perfect love that is an antidote to pain and brokenness. —S.O.