Women Hunt a Serial Killer and Other New Mysteries for the Club

Dumplings and wontons are such satisfying comfort foods, and I imagine a grandma’s recipe will be the most comforting. Maxine’s granny’s wontons look delicious and her Instagram page includes vegan modifications.

You’ll need: ground pork or tofu, shiitake mushrooms, ginger, water chestnuts, soy sauce, sesame oil, cornstarch, and wonton skins.

For a full list of ingredients and instructions, visit her Insta post.

This is the second book in a series that has an award-winning first book — Clark and Division — but I don’t think you need to have read the first to appreciate this one. It’s 1946, and the Ito family has been released from the Manzanar detention center and allowed to return to their home state, California, like many other Japanese Americans who were forced into incarceration camps. Aki Ito returns to life as a nurse’s aide and comes across an abused elderly man who turns out to be the father of her husband’s best friend, Shinji Watanabe. The case has her wondering if her husband’s friend could really be guilty of elder abuse, but then a shooting sets her on the path of answering even bigger questions.

This is another second book in a series that you don’t have to read the first one to enjoy. Here, Detective Inaya Rahman is caught between two cases that deal with deeply embedded racism and prejudice. In one case, officer Harry Cooper is following up on a report of vandals in Blackwater Falls, Colorado, when he comes across a young Black man who he said was armed. But the alleged gun was actually a spray paint can. Then, in Denver, a Latine teen is killed during a drug raid that goes south. As people protest on both sides of the cases, Rahman gets a visit from Officer John Broda, a man who assaulted her when they worked together in the past. His son Kelly is the cop who shot the teen during the drug raid, and he wants her help in exonerating him.

Here’s another example of our fascination with serial killers, but from a refreshing perspective. This time, the tragedy is told up front, and the lives of the victims and those they cared about are expanded upon rather than the inverse. In 1978, while the news of a serial killer terrorized the Pacific Northwest, the young women of a sorority at Florida State University’s Tallahassee campus are preparing for an exciting night. What they don’t know is that that same killer from the other side of the country will visit them and that Pamela Schumacher’s decision to stay home will make her the sole survivor of something terrible. Meanwhile, back in the PNW, Tina believes her girlfriend Ruth was a victim of the same person responsible for the Tallahassee Tragedy. Both Pamela and Tina are set on a course to uncover the truth that sends them hurdling towards each other.

To be cute, I thought I’d add in a book that mixes in some fantasy. This is described as “Stranger Things meets the Golden Age of Detective fiction” and follows Artie Quick, a young Bostonian woman living in 1909. During the day, she’s a regular ole salesgirl of women’s accessories, but at night, she dons men’s clothing and explores her interest in criminal investigation by taking classes at the YMCA’s Evening Institute for Younger Men. In a bid to apply her learning, she and her bestie Theodore, a well-off young man interested in the occult, investigate a number of violent abductions that lead them to those in power.