Has anyone ever gotten an unexpected late-night call that didn’t immediately kickstart their anxiety? In the case of Ohio PI Roxane Weary, protagonist of Kristen Lepionka’s The Stories You Tell, the caller is her brother Andrew. The last time he’d called in the middle of the night had been to tell her that their father had died. This time doesn’t appear to be as dire, at least at first blush. A distraught former fling, Addison, had shown up at Andrew’s apartment and then disappeared, leaving behind only the record of a brief phone call and a deep scratch on Andrew’s neck from when he grabbed her arm in an attempt to keep her from running off into the cold night. But when Addison doesn’t turn up the next day, or the day after that, her family and friends begin to get worried, the authorities get summoned, and Andrew is on the hook as the last person to have seen her, the wound on his neck taking on ominous overtones. But from here it gets complicated—and moves from complicated to lethal in very short order. Roxane is easily one of the edgiest and most deeply flawed suspense heroines since Robert Eversz’s Nina Zero. Read this one, and you’ll soon be perusing the bookstore shelves for the previous two books in the series.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
