The woman who helped me, who I later found out was named Luci Zahray, but who everyone calls The Poison Lady, has been advising mystery writers for decades, and I wanted to know more. “A walking talking, poison Wiktionary,” is how Susan Wittig Albert, the NYT bestselling author of more than fifty books, describes her.
Luci is a retired pharmacist with a master’s degree in toxicology from Texas A&M. She has two great passions in life: poisons and mysteries, though she’s never poisoned anyone or tried to write a mystery.
In the Japanese author Emi Yagi’s prizewinning debut, “Diary of a Void,” a single woman in her mid-30s, frustrated by her stupefying job at a company that manufactures cardboard cores for paper products, spontaneously decides to feign pregnancy in order to get out of menial tasks like making coffee and cleaning up after meetings — the stench of unappreciated labor aggravates her morning sickness. Over the course of the novel, she carries the lie to term.
The Year of Miracles is Risbridger’s account of how she cooked her way through the ensuing grief. And because it is, ominously, set in 2020, she is grieving not just the loss of her partner, but also the loss of a whole way of pre-pandemic life.
“This is supposed to be the year when the world, my world, starts again;” Risbridger writes as she first hears news of the pandemic. “This is not the year the world is supposed to end, because my world has already ended.”
From 2002 to 2009 author Mary Emerick worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Sitka as a wilderness ranger, charged with monitoring and managing use on Baranof and Chichagof islands. She initiated a kayak ranger program in which she, with other Forest Service employees or volunteers, traveled the island coastlines by kayak to check on campsites, archaeological sites, trespass cabins, invasive plants, trails and the people who used the public lands for hunting and recreating. In “The Last Layer of the Ocean” she describes that life, when rain was a near-constant companion and storms threatened but also when rare sun-kissed days illuminated hidden bays, sparkling waters, and every shade of green.
The author, Kathy Kleiman, now a law professor at American University, was a computer programmer in high school. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she discovered two photos with women standing in front of the ENIAC, the 80ft-tall and 80ft-long behemoth invented for the army by J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. From that moment on, Kleiman became obsessed with learning the identities of all the earliest women programers.
The result of that magnificent obsession was a documentary in 2014 and this book, which melds social history with the major events of the second world war and the biographies of these six remarkable pioneers to produce an irresistible narrative.