Jolene's Books and More

09/10/2026

I pestered a librarian once a month for years trying to get every Miss Marple book in order.

Jane Marple is an elderly woman in a village who solves murders with no training, no badge, and no authority whatsoever. What she has is decades of watching people closely and a memory for what human beings actually do when they are frightened or greedy. Agatha Christie called it observation. Everyone else called it luck, right up until Marple was proved correct.

This is the original cozy mystery. No romance, no s*x, no gore. Just the puzzle, and an old lady nobody takes seriously until it is too late.

Some of the language needs a modern reader's patience. The construction does not. If you want to understand how a mystery is built, take one apart.

I do not have Marple in the shop right now. I do have four Christie ebooks at $1.99, which are Poirot and Tommy & Tuppence. Different detective, same architect.

Who was your first Christie?

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/the-mysterious-affair-at-styles-by-agatha-christie/

09/08/2026

A widow with grown children walks into CIA headquarters and asks about becoming a spy. They say yes.

That is Mrs. Emily Pollifax, and Dorothy Gilman wrote fourteen books about her. Pollifax reads people, takes karate lessons, grows geraniums between assignments, and travels most of the world thwarting people who badly underestimate her. There is no s*x in the series and the occasional bit of romance. It is a clean, funny, genuinely suspenseful set of books and a good entry point for a younger reader.

Here is my part of it. Gilman never had a website, so I built her one in 1996 and I have kept it running ever since. She sent me a signed copy of her last book to say thank you. I have every Pollifax in paperback or hardback and I reread them every year. Her readers and I eventually got the whole series, and her adult novels, converted to ebook.

I do not stock Pollifax. What I do have are two of her early titles published as Dorothy Gilman Butters, before she found Mrs. Pollifax. Enchanted Caravan is one of them.

Thirty years running a fan site for an author who has been gone since 2012. I would do it again.

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/enchanted-caravan-by-dorothy-gilman-butters/

09/06/2026

Patricia Cornwell worked as a computer analyst in the Richmond, Virginia medical examiner's office before she was a novelist. She had been a reporter before that.

You can tell. The Kay Scarpetta books are dense with procedure and they earn it.

Scarpetta starts the series as Chief Medical Examiner for Virginia. Over the years she gets pushed around, relocated, and eventually builds her own forensic lab. She is smart, she works too hard, and she is hardheaded in a way that costs her. Her love life is a wreck. Her family and friends have some genuinely strange quirks.

The books are long. They are also the kind of long where you are annoyed when it ends.

I am behind on this series and I will admit it in public. Three Scarpetta titles are in the shop, including Black Notice.

Where did you leave off?

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/black-notice-by-patricia-cornwell/

09/04/2026

Anna Pigeon is on television and I have not stopped thinking about it.

USA Network premiered the series on Friday, August 7, and it airs Fridays at 10. Tracy Spiridakos plays Anna. Morwyn Brebner is running it, ten episodes in the first season, and the premiere adapts Track of the Cat, which is book one. Tricia Helfer plays her sister Molly. Ronnie Rowe Jr. plays FBI agent Frederick Stanton. They shot it in Calgary.

If you have not read the books: Nevada Barr worked summers in the National Parks, and out of that came a park ranger who transfers from park to park and finds a body in every one. Barr writes those parks like someone who has stood in them at six in the morning. The landscape is not scenery in these books. It is the second antagonist. Anna is a loner by nature, good at her job, and genuinely put out that people keep dying where she works.

This is the series that put my mother and me in an RV. We read them and we started planning. We made it to one National Forest and one National Park, both close to home in Jacksonville. Not the tour we had drawn up. Still the right idea. I am working on getting back out there.

Flashback is in the shop, $4.99.

Anyone watching? Tell me if they got the parks right.

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/flashback-by-nevada-barr/

09/02/2026

I wrote a post about this in 2023 and I opened it by admitting I did not have anything else to write about that week. Which was true, and also a dodge, because the question has been sitting with me for years.

Women authors writing male detectives. Men authors writing female ones. Or the traditional split, each writing their own.

J.A. Jance writes both. J.P. Beaumont, male private investigator. Joanna Brady, female sheriff. I have read both series and I only reread one.

James Patterson writes the Women's Murder Club, four women running an investigation together, and the characters are well built. He still cannot help putting a masculine hand on them. What is interesting is what happened next: Andrew Gross co-wrote books two and three, then Maxine Paetro took over from book four. You can feel the characters shift. I think it got better.

Here is where I have to be careful with myself. I believe women writers do not get the same push as men in this business. I have believed it a long time. But my own bookshelf is not evidence of it, because my shelf reflects my buying, not the market.

So I am asking rather than concluding. Which do you prefer, and can you say why?

https://jolenesbooksandmore.com/women-versus-men-writers/

08/31/2026

Sue Grafton started at A is for Alibi in 1982 and made it to Y before she died.

Twenty-five letters. One woman. Kinsey Millhone, private investigator in the invented California town of Santa Teresa. Ex-cop, ex-insurance adjuster, settled on PI work because she likes her independence and does not take orders well.

Here is the thing I love about that series. Grafton kept Kinsey in the 1980s on purpose. No cell phone, no database, no DNA lab on speed dial. Kinsey works a case with a card file, a landline, and her own two feet. It is a little depressing when you think about the tools a modern investigator has, and it is also exactly why the books hold up.

Grafton was also a founding member of Sisters in Crime. That is twice in this series I have said that name and I am not going to stop.

Seven of the alphabet books are in the shop. Someone is still keeping her website and social feeds going, and I know her readers appreciate it.

Which letter is your favorite?

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/k-is-for-killer-by-sue-grafton/

08/29/2026

Before there was a whole shelf of women private investigators, there was VI Warshawski.

Sara Paretsky put her on the page in 1982. A Chicago Southside kid, daughter of a Polish American cop and an Italian opera singer, former public defender who decided she liked her independence better. Die-hard Cubs fan. Black belt. Appreciates good wh***ey and keeps a cluttered life, which Paretsky has admitted she shares with her.

I was hooked on the series long before Kathleen Turner played her on screen, and I thought Turner did right by the character.

Paretsky also founded Sisters in Crime, which has spent forty years pushing to get women crime writers reviewed and stocked on the same terms as the men. That part of her record matters as much to me as the books do.

I have all eight Warshawski titles on the shelf, $5.00 each. Indemnity Only is book one and the place to start.

Which one got you first?

https://bookstore.jolenesbooksandmore.com/product/indemnity-only-by-sara-paretsky/

08/27/2026

Ten women. Ten ways to solve a murder.

Eve Dallas. Alexandra Hargreaves. Jane Marple. Emily Pollifax. Joanna Brady. Anita Blake. Anna Pigeon. Kay Scarpetta. VI Warshawski. Kinsey Millhone.

A village spinster with no badge. A medical examiner. A park ranger. A retired widow who talked the CIA into hiring her. A U.S. Marshal who raises the dead. Two private investigators who both quit steadier work because they could not take orders.

Three of them will never get another book. Christie, Gilman and Grafton are gone. Those three are the ones that got me reading in the first place, back when I was young enough that the librarian knew me by sight and dreaded the sound of the door.

Over the next few weeks I am going through all ten, one at a time, and telling you what each one taught me.

The full list is on the blog. Who did I miss? I know I missed somebody.

https://jolenesbooksandmore.com/top-ten-female-detective-characters-in-books/

08/25/2026

For Dolly, From a Jolene

I was named Jolene before the song existed. Fifty years of teasing later, on the day Dolly Parton died, I decided the other woman deserved to grow old too. A memorial, and a story, from one Jolene.

08/16/2026

Taking time out for just writing is just as important as doing all the business things you might need to do as well.