At our February 24, 2025 meeting, we discussed The Maid by Nita Prose. Most of our readers did not have high expectations, but they all loved the book! It was a quick read, but we liked the mystery and the characters. Overall, our group gave it the highest rating.

Summary: "The New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls reveals the untold story of how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, a sweeping story of a "sisterhood" of women spies spanning three generations who broke the glass ceiling, helped transform spycraft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden. Upon its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency instantly became one of the most important spy services in the world. Like every male-dominated workplace in Eisenhower America, the growing intelligence agency needed women to type memos, send messages, manipulate expense accounts, and keep secrets. Despite discrimination-even because of it-these clerks and secretaries rose to become some of the shrewdest, toughest operatives the agency employed. Because women were seen as unimportant, they moved unnoticed on the streets of Bonn, Geneva, and Moscow, stealing secrets under the noses of the KGB. Back at headquarters, they built the CIA's critical archives-first by hand, then by computer. These women also battled institutional stereotyping and beat it. Men argued they alone could run spy rings. But the women proved they could be spymasters, too. During the Cold War, women made critical contributions to U.S. intelligence, sometimes as officers, sometimes as unpaid spouses, working together as their numbers grew. The women also made unique sacrifices, giving up marriage, children, even their own lives. They noticed things that the men at the top didn't see. In the final years of the twentieth century, it was a close-knit network of female CIA analysts who warned about the rising threat of Al Qaeda. After the 9/11 attacks, women rushed to join the fight as a new job, "targeter," came to prominence. They showed that painstaking data analysis would be crucial to the post-9/11 national security landscape-an effort that culminated spectacularly in the CIA's successful efforts to track down Osama Bin Laden and, later, Ayman al-Zawahiri. With the same meticulous reporting and storytelling verve that she brought to her New York Times bestseller Code Girls, Liza Mundy has written an indispensable and sweeping history that reveals how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age"

We just discussed Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone on January 27th. The book discussion guide is available here. It had a mixed reception--several members liked it and others thought there were too many characters and too much going on. Overall, the feeling that the book was a literary exercise kept it lighter even though there were a lot of murders. One group member suggested that it was similar to the book, Killers of a Certain Age, which we read in July 2024.