IP Picks🔎: The White House Maid Who Changed History
âž• Procedurals, puzzles and partner-swapping!
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
Before we get to this week’s picks, let’s take care of some housekeeping. Specifically, how you can get the latest Hollywood inside dope for a song. That’s right, The Optionist is currently having a flash sale for new and returning subscribers at a special introductory rate. For the price of one lunch per week, you can now get access to our exclusive, curated selection of the hottest and most promising optionable material before the competition.
Three months takes us through the 2024 election. So you have a choice: Would you rather spend the fall doomscrolling over politics or use that time to find your next project? See, this isn’t just work, it’s a therapeutic distraction!
Which brings me to a feel-good story . . . Perhaps you’ve been following the news out of England, where right-wing agitators wrongly blamed a knife attack in a small town on an immigrant and used the incident to incite a wave of violent, anti-Islamic protests. But wait, here’s the feel-good part: After a library in Liverpool was severely damaged in the riots, a group of authors, including Matt Haig and Nigella Lawson, raised more than £250,000 (about $323,000) to rebuild it — more than double the original goal. Writers, of course, are some of the biggest advocates of public libraries. And say what you will about James Patterson’s merits as a prose stylist, but he’s given more than $120 million to support literacy efforts, libraries and writing programs, including a recent $50,000 grant that provided 250 librarians with a $250 gift as a thank you. Despite all of my snark about his latest opus, Eruption, I couldn’t respect Patterson’s charitable work more.
Now, on to this week’s picks. I usually start off with my favorite selection of the week, but this week is loaded with favorites, including a CSI-like period procedural, a new book from an author I adore and a novel about sexual hijinks in a very unlikely setting. That’s right, sexual hijinks! Have I got your attention? Good. Let’s go . . .
The full lineup for today features:
A feel-good drama about the relationship between a president and his political-activist housekeeper
A YA adventure-thriller about a female magician and her refugee assistant battling a global conspiracy
A fascinating domestic drama about a woman dealing with the fallout from infidelity and partner-swapping within her devout religious community
A puzzling YA mystery (literally!) about six interns trying to unravel the story of a legendary game designer and her dangerous secrets
A true-life procedural about a mid-20th century heiress who became a celebrated criminologist and whose largesse helped invent the field of forensic science
