REVIEW: The Change

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on January 6, 2025 • ( 1 )

Catching up on reviews, here is the book I read for November’s book club meeting. I liked this one a lot more than our December pick.

About the Book

Title: The Change

Author: Kirsten Miller

Series: none

Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Supernatural

Pages: 480

Edition Read: Kindle eBook

Dates Read: November 19 – 24, 2024

Blurb: In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment…

After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn’t take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead—a gift she’s inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn’t left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett’s life is far from over—in fact, she’s undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw—until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl’s murder leads to more bodies, and to the town’s most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don’t apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands…

Review

This one was a lot of fun, especially if you like seeing bad people mostly get what they deserve.

First things first, I loved that the characters trying to solve this mystery were all older women (a.k.a. women around my age). A lot of books where girls or women come into their “powers” tie that into them going through puberty, but this one ties it to menopause. That makes so much more sense to me – this is the time of our lives when having a magical ability would be useful!

I also really loved the characters. Harriett and Jo are very upfront, no nonsense people (though in very different ways) and they are not here for your foolishness. An example: we first really meet Harriett after she has lost her marriage and career. She has taken up gardening and her yard is extremely overgrown. The head of the HOA sends her messages, which she ignores, until he finally comes to her house. What he didn’t know was that she had planted a bunch of semi-poisonous plants, so whenever he came to try and enforce the HOA “rules,” he broke out into a nasty rash. Trust me, he deserved it. He was pretty awful.

Not as awful as the real villains of this story. It’s a fairly twisted plot between the people who have money and the town authority figures and because of that, it’s really hard to know who to trust and who to ask for help. Which is why our three ladies take matters into their own hands and kick ass doing it. I’m making it sound like it was easy, but it definitely wasn’t. Even until the very last chapter, you weren’t sure if they were going to make it or if the horrible people were every going to get what was coming to them. It made for a very suspenseful story that was really exciting to read.

GoodReads rating: 4 stars. Probably 4 1/2 if GoodReads worked that way. I only lowered it because there were quite a few heavy handed cliches that got on my nerves from time to time.