Women Humor

It is said that a picture may be worth a thousand words, but an old photograph can inspire many more. In this beguiling book, Alexander McCall Smith casts his eye over five chanced-upon photographs from the era of black-and-white photography and imagines the stories behind them. Who were those people, what were their stories, why are they smiling, what made them sad?

Jodie Boyd is a shy and anxious twenty-something, completely unsure what to do with her life. Her older sister, Bree, is an adventurous, hugely successful Instagram influencer with more than a million followers. She's the most alive person Jodie knows—up until Bree's unfathomable, untimely death from Leukemia. The Boyds are devastated, not to mention overwhelmed with medical debt. But Bree thought of everything—and soon, Jodie is shocked by a new post on her sister's Instagram feed.

When Daphne arrives in Berlin, the last thing she expects is to run into more drama than she left behind. Of course, she knew she'd need to do the usual: make friends, acquire lovers, grapple with German and a whole new way of life. She even expected the long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, and the pitfalls of online dating in another language. The paranoia, the second-guessing of her every choice, the covert behaviors? Probably come with the territory. But one night, when Daphne is alone in her apartment, something strange, unnerving and entirely unexpected intervenes.

Aerospace engineer Esther Abbott doesn't believe in love, but she's perfectly happy to hate her annoying screenwriter neighbor, Jonathan. Until she's forced to strike a devil's bargain with him: he distracts her best friend from a mouth-breather ex, and in return Esther will help him with the sci-fi script he's writing. Her patience is put to the test when it's time to fulfill her end of the deal. But the more time she spends with her nemesis, the more hate turns into attraction - and attraction into something much deeper.

The Private Investigator's Handbook Rule #1: Don't break the law Rule #2: See Rule #1 ...And then there's Addison Holmes, who makes up her handbook as she goes along. Addison is licensed to carry and she means business. The only thing getting in her way is a sexy detective, a neighborhood watch from hell, a dead billionaire, a black market sperm bank, and a long lost heir. Piece of cake...

In between running her vampire nightclub and hunting down the perfect pair of shoes, Betsy learns her long-lost half-sister Laura is actually the spawn of Satan. Complicating matters, prophesy states that the devil's offspring and the queen of the vampires are destined to rule the world together.

Mma Ramotswe is busy investigating her latest case: a woman who is looking for her family. The problem is, the woman doesn't know her real name of whether any members of her family are now living. Meanwhile, Phuti Radiphuti has bought Mma Makutsi a glorious new bed. Unfortunately, it will inadvertently cause her several sleepless nights.

Henry has ended his marriage to Caroline and headed off to Noosa with Mercedes' grade three teacher, Martha. Caroline, having shredded a wardrobe-full of Henry's suits, has gone after them. Craig and Lesley have dropped over briefly from next door to catch up on the fallout from Henry and Caroline's all-night row. And Janice, Caroline's sister, is staying for the weekend to look after the girls because Janice is the sensible one.

Mona is 26 and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. She moved there mostly because of a bad boyfriend - a junkie named Mr. Disgusting, long story - and her efforts to restart her life since haven’t exactly gone as planned. For one thing, she’s got another bad boyfriend. This one she calls Dark, and he happens to be married to one of Mona’s clients. He also might be a little unstable. Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster, either.

My name is Addison Holmes, and I teach history at James Madison High School in Whiskey Bayou, Georgia. You might be under the assumption that my life went to the dogs when my fiancé left me at the altar for the home economics teacher, or when I got notice that my apartment building was going to be condemned, or even when I was desperate enough to strip to my unmentionables to earn some extra cash. The truth is that I'm pretty much used to disasters following me around on a daily basis.

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: He's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved - he was always a little distant - and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Meg is relaxing in the hammock, taste-testing Michael’s latest batch of Arnold Palmers and watching the hummingbirds at their feeders when her hopes for a relaxing early summer morning are dashed. First her father recruits her to help him install a new batch of bees in the hive in her backyard. Then Mayor Shiffley recruits her to placate the NIMBYs (Not in my backyard), as she calls them—a group of newcomers to Caerphilly who have built McMansions next door to working farms and then do their best to make life miserable for the farmers.

The troubled teenager continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life. In between the ups and downs of his relationship with the divine Pandora and worrying that his genius is going unrecognized, Adrian Mole chronicles the pains and pleasures of a misspent adolescence.

Meg's husband has decided to escalate his one-man show of Dickens's A Christmas Carol into a full-scale production with a large cast including their sons Jamie and Josh as Tiny Tim and young Scrooge and Meg helping as stage manager. When a famous, although slightly over-the-hill, actor comes to town to play the starring role of Scrooge, no one expects that he's bringing a lot of baggage and enemies with him.

Meg Langslow is spending the summer at the Biscuit Mountain Craft Center, helping her grandmother Cordelia run the studios. But someone is committing acts of vandalism, which threaten to ruin the newly opened center's reputation.

When sixty-five-year-old Bindu Desai inherits a million dollars, she’s astounded—and horrified. The windfall threatens to expose a shameful mistake from her youth. On an impulse, Bindu quickly spends it on something unexpected: a condo in a posh retirement community in Florida. The impulsive decision blindsides Bindu’s daughter-in-law, Aly. At forty-seven, Aly still shares a home with Bindu even after her divorce from Bindu’s son. But maybe this change is just the push Aly needs to fight for her own dreams.

Meg Langslow is at Trinity Episcopal locking up after an event and checking on the toucan that Rev. Robyn Smith is fostering in her office. After hearing a hammering in the crypt, Meg finds an elderly parishioner lying dead on the floor. Several niches have been chiseled open, several urns knocked out, and amid the spilled ashes is a gold ring with a huge red stone. The curmudgeonly victim had become disgruntled with the church and ranted all over town about taking back his wife's ashes.

Meet Tannie Maria - recipe writer turned crime fighter - and before she has time to take her Venus Chocolate Cake out of the oven, our glorious heroine finds herself embroiled in another mystery. In this wonderful sequel to Recipes for Love and Murder, Slimkat the bushman finds his life under threat and Tannie Maria is determined to find out who wants to kill him. But her new boyfriend, Detective Lieutenant Henk Kannemeyer, is keen to keep Tannie out of danger.

When Izzy Spellman, PI, is arrested for the fourth time in three months, she writes it off as a job hazard. She's been (obsessively) keeping surveillance on a suspicious next door neighbor (suspect's name: John Brown), convinced he's up to no good - even if her parents (the management at Spellman Investigations) are not.

Eve has her own story, and she's been waiting millennia for Barbara McBride-Smith to tell it. It's the same for Mrs. Noah. Talk about misunderstood or under-appreciated women! McBride-Smith singles them out for her trademark feminist humor. And following Eve and Mrs. Noah's stories are four of McBride-Smith's retellings of Greek myths from her West Texas good-ole-girl perspective.