After Dr. John McKenzie destroys the equipment of a fellow member, the wolf-watching group to which he and his long-suffering wife belong are glad to see him go, tired of his tirades. Then Lew Ferris, sheriff of the Loon Lake area of northern Wisconsin, gets a call about a couple of missing wolf watchers—the McKenzies—whom the state patrol thinks might be in her area. Lew calls part-time deputy Ray Pradt, fisherman extraordinaire and the best tracker she knows, to help in the search. Ray, who coaches a high school muskie fishing team, has other things on his mind—he’s furious that one of the members of his team has been threatened by someone demanding he cheat in order to give the man’s sports-betting business an edge. Turning his attention to Lew’s problem, Ray has a hunch the McKenzies are in Robideaux Forest, and he and Lew set off. Seeing that an old loggers’ cabin has been rebuilt and is now housing crates of high-powered weapons, Lew calls in a larger police presence in the hope of catching the gunrunners. Lew is in a long-term romantic relationship with dentist Doc Osborne, who shares her love of fly-fishing. His house is on a lake and across the road from Ray’s trailer, where Lew meets back up with the deputy, who has some new ideas about where the McKenzies may be. Sure enough, Ray finds them shot dead and partially buried, presumably by gunrunners who caught them near the cabin. When someone takes a shot at Lew through Doc’s window, it only spurs them on to solve the murder, catch the gunrunners, and unravel the sports-betting scam.

Dr. Gwen Griffith is no stranger to Dillynaidd, where she did her undergraduate degree. Now, having watched print journalism fade away, she sees no future for herself despite her star credentials, so she’s delighted to take up the offer from Dean Carolyn Montgomery, her old college friend, to return to the university. Upon her arrival, Ellis, her teaching assistant, escorts Gwen to her lovely faculty housing. Carolyn arranges a meet and greet with her fellow professors, all of whom seem happy to meet her—except Alice Rice, who expected to get her job. Soon after Gwen returns to her rooms, she hears a loud banging on the door, and when she opens it, Alice starts to say something and then falls on top of Gwen. When Gwen screams, Professor Rhys Davies arrives, but though they give Alice CPR, they can’t save her. She’s dead. The attractive Det. Gareth Jones seems suspicious of Gwen and questions if it was a natural death. As a long-time investigative reporter, Gwen is curious. So is Ellis, who wants to write a story that Gwen supports as a teaching exercise. Since Alice was mean to her students, the staff, and her fellow faculty members, the number of people who might have wanted her dead is overwhelming. As Gwen and Ellis take a deep dive into Alice’s past looking for clues, it’s clear that Det. Jones doesn’t approve, even though forensics has revealed that she was poisoned. When Gwen is followed and gets death threats, she knows she’s hit a nerve. Can she uncover the truth, and can her new friends help keep her alive?

When Lizzie Dowling, Queen Victoria’s Irish-born parlor maid, is found drowned near the Quarr Abbey ruins on the Isle of Wight, Julia, who happens to be vacationing there with her grandfather, examines the body over the objections of the local constabulary that the death was obviously accidental and a woman has no business messing with corpses. Julia, Scotland Yard’s first female medical examiner, doesn’t establish conclusively that Lizzie was murdered, but she does discover that she was four months pregnant. And when Lizzie’s younger sister, Brigid, who’s been summoned from Cork by Lady Susan Styles, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, is strangled along the way, it’s hard to believe that both women weren’t killed by the same person for the same shadowy reason. Once his pursuit of criminal fugitive Edgar Romilly ends with an unexpected jolt that sends him back home, Richard is free to rejoin Julia to solve this new case. The path to a solution will lead through thieves, smugglers, gunrunners, multiple murders, and several acts of anti-English terrorism, rumored and actual. Sadly, it also leads though dozens of characters, some real, some fictional, some aristocratic, some impoverished, but very few of them memorable, before the secrets that link the Dowling sisters, the royal family, and the Troubles come to light with little detective work by Julia and not much more by Richard.

Juliet Capshaw may be heavily pregnant with twins, but that doesn’t slow her down; she’s still coming up with new delicacies for Torte, her bakery in Ashland, Oregon, and keeping up a social life with her husband, Carlos, and their neighbors. One of her dearest friends is Lance Rousseau, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, whose productions bring in hordes of tourists. Lance’s wedding to longtime partner Arlo is nearly foundering in the face of Lance’s ambitious plans. At the moment, the play on view is Perfect Crime, and behind the scenes, there’s a great deal of tension between the actors and their director, Kean Armitage, which Lance hopes will be mitigated by the fabulous cast party he and Jules are planning. Once Jules meets the actors, she’s surprised by the hostility surrounding Armitage, who harasses the women; feuds with his bitter soon-to-be ex-wife, Vera Armitage, who claims to be a reviewer; and insists on a method approach that’s turned his male lead into a stalker. Given the short notice, Jules and her staff are busy preparing food for the party, but it all comes to a screeching halt when Armitage is shot dead in a dressing room. Jules has already helped her stepfather, who’s the law in Ashland, solve a long string of crimes, so she’s ready to pitch in to help the police. After all, she’s already spent enough time talking to cast members to know there may be a surfeit of possible killers.

In this candid if carefully crafted memoir, Newsom revisits his fourth-generation San Francisco roots, lingering over the family mythology behind his political rise. After his parents’ separation, Newsom and his sister were raised by their mother, Tessa, who struggled financially; his father, William, an appellate court judge and at one time manager of the Gordon P. Getty Family Trust, remained a powerful presence. Newsom underscores the hardships that marked his youth—severe dyslexia and academic frustration—while pointing to the confidence and discipline he found on the basketball court and baseball field. Yet even as the likely presidential candidate casts himself as an underdog entrepreneur who built the PlumpJack Estate Winery and hospitality empire before entering politics, his origin story cannot entirely escape the glow of the Getty connection, which he acknowledges shadowed his rise from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor and, eventually, governor. “In my life as a husband, father, and politician, the Getty connection would cloud and distort many things,” he writes. “In the eyes of the press, I was forever the ‘golden boy’ whose daddy had prospered because of his ties to the Gettys and now the son was simply following suit.” The tension between bootstrap resolve and inherited access to privilege becomes the book’s lingering subtext. Newsom surveys his record, which includes authorizing same-sex marriage in San Francisco ahead of national consensus and advancing legislation on climate policy, gun safety, and reproductive rights. He also acknowledges personal missteps, among them the collapse of his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle. He presents his later partnership with Jennifer Siebel and their four children as steadier ground. The memoir closes in 2024, before the next chapter of national turbulence, though he recounts a revealing 2018 meeting with President Donald Trump on Air Force One following the deadly wildfire in Paradise, California. That exchange, even more than the measured recitation of achievements, offers a sharper glimpse of the political instincts that define him.