LYNDA DREWS' PAGE: Disposable Wives: Murder and Menace in Green Bay's Rural Belgian Settlement; The Maid and the Socialite: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials

DISPOSABLE WIVES: Murder and Menace in Green Bay’s Rural Belgian Settlement
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, preorder for delivery on 12 May 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the quiet Belgian farming settlements near Green Bay, Wisconsin, whispers traveled faster than truth.

At the center of it all stood Jean Philippe Soquet—a man known by many names: the Bay Settlement Bruiser, the Belgian Archfiend… and, to some, a murderer. Over four decades, suspicion followed him, especially in the wake of multiple disturbing deaths and disappearances—including those of three of his wives.

What began as gossip soon hardened into something far more troubling.

Determined to uncover the truth, Pauline Villiesse—sister to Soquet’s third wife—refuses to let the past be buried. With the help of Xavier Martin, a respected translator navigating both language and loyalty within the Belgian immigrant community, she begins a relentless pursuit of justice.

Set in the decades following the Civil War, this riveting true story reveals a world shaped by faith, survival, and tightly bound traditions—where secrets are protected, reputations are everything, and justice is far from guaranteed.

Through courage, persistence, and an unyielding search for truth, Pauline and Xavier confront a chilling question:

How many lives can be lost before a community is willing to see what’s been there all along?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Male privilege is still unassailable, though that is steadily eroding. Hence the hysterical white-male rear guard action being waged by the reactionaries in this century. This is, they know, their final opportunity to avoid the reckoning for their multitudinous crimes against everyone not them.

As one who has benefitted from the privilege they've abused for millennia, i say bring the reckoning. Make it impossible for this hideous pattern of abuse to recur this generation. #ReleaseEpsteinFiles

The facts of Jean-Philippe Soquet's life are hard to stomach even at over 150 years' remove. The crimes he committed, and many we no doubt still don't know of, will call forth the horrified revolted rage that, in the twenty-first century, we're feeling as the Epstein Files slowly, inexorably, come to light. Apologists for Soquet's crimes pointed to his undeniable good works. That merely proves the ancient truism "bad people can do good things just like good people can do bad things" is never not accurate. It also follows that the actions don't change the essence of the person. Soquet's evil murdering heart did good too? Take that up with your god on Judgment Day.

I read this précis of a *mountain* of research done by the author. I came to the conclusion that Jean-Philippe Soquet was a sadistic, murdering scumbag, and no amount of good he did as well changes his status as an evil murdering bastard.

It's a tough read because it's so well sourced. It's stunning that male privilege has operated, and still operates, so well that even murder is...swept away, forgotten, ignored...because the remorse-free murderer does some objectively good things. How many women must die, lose their "one wild and precious life" in Mary Oliver's deathless formulation, before it matters more than someone's pallid do-gooding?

I've decided for myself: one.

Let justice be done at long last. It won't raise the dead. It might help heal the affected. That alone makes reading the case against a long-dead man for his crimes worth your time.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE MAID AND THE SOCIALITE: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the shadows of progress, two women's stories were erased. Until now.

What if a respected surgeon could destroy your life with just one diagnosis?

In early 20th century Green Bay, Wisconsin, this terrifying reality was all too true for two women. Mary, an illiterate maid, and Mollie, a college-educated socialite, fell victim to the physical violence and mental abuse of celebrated surgeon Dr. John R. Minahan. To silence them, he claimed they had the shameful and dreaded disease of syphilis. This is the first full account ever written about Dr. Minahan, whose wealth built a college stadium, science hall, and six-story office building—all named for him—while history lost, or perhaps erased, Mary’s and Mollie’s heroic stories.

Until now.

Eerily mirroring contemporary debates around gender equality, misinformation, and wealth disparity, this tale remains alarmingly relevant. It is a story of power, abuse, and the tireless pursuit of justice. Delve into this haunting yet inspiring historical tale to uncover the forgotten stories of Mary and Mollie, two courageous women who dared to stand up against a powerful adversary.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. CW: repeated violations of bodily autonomy

My Review: I have never been interested in Green Bay, Wisconsin; never thought much about it; never considered the idea that it, all hundred-ish thousand people in and around it, would have "socialites" because that suggests to my mind big-stage dramatics. Football, whether US or FIFA interpretations of it, bores me. So, no...not the instantly obvious reader of the book, me.

The publicist offered it to me, and because I've come to trust their take on the kind of stories I enjoy reading, I said yes. Thanks, Shaun! I owe you one.

John Minahan was a bounder, a cad, and a creep. I'd say he'd be diagnosable as a malignant narcissist in the twenty-first century (aren't all rapists, though? serious question). In his lifetime I suspect people thought of him, quietly and privately, as a thin-skinned bully. Feminists are likely to see in him a flattened caricature of "Manliness." The author, clearly a subject-matter expert more well-informed than the man himself on his pathologies, presents a vast body of details that support all these views of him. The gestalt of the (possibly too many) facts s wisely left to you to decide. She has an opinion but presents it as such, not as incontroverible fact.

The sheer volume of awfulness detailed by Mary and Mollie makes difficult reading. Obviously that is a vanishingly small concern compared to the living hell the perpetrator inflicted on his victims, and got away with doing so because they are women. When these two women stood up to him, and brough the receipts to show him up, he pulled out the V-card used against women since time immemorial: he accused them of having VD...syphilis...to show them as being un-Virtuous therefore deserving everything they said he did, but of course he didnt because un-Virtuous women lie to get back at men but even if he did they deserved it.

Does any of this, any part of this playbook, sound at all familiar?

Reading about the trial, the havoc that any legal proceeding wreaks on the lives and the mental health of the innocent and the guilty alike, makes me feel so hugely grateful to Virginia Giuffre for her astounding act of tenacious courage.

#OnlyRedactVictims

In this time of reckoning, it behooves all of us to learn the history of abuse suffered by our ancestors. Painful it is, necessary it must become.

WHERE THE GIRLS WERE, if you're not a worried feminist at the end of the read you didn't read carefully enough

WHERE THE GIRLS WERE
KATE SCHATZ
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this electrifying and heartfelt historical coming-of-age novel, set against the tumultuous backdrop of 1960s San Francisco, a pregnant teenager reckons with womanhood and agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers.

It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Phillips is called by her middle name “Baker” by everyone. She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully-planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.

Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, Baker finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with a group of pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she reckons with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”

Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society's expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I remember my much-older sister having a friend who was sent away to "nature camp" for a few months. Is that transparent or what? It was part of the culture, though, so while there were significant looks and quiet changes of subject, it wasn't treated as stunning or weird. The Pill was very newly available in the US, though I think it wasn't legal for unmarried women in California at that time. The battles of the Second-Wave Feminists for full adulthood and, crucially for Baker's story, bodily autonomy, were still unfolding.

Baker, poor lamb, didn't come from sophisticated people who didn't approve of her accidental pregnancy but didn't freak out. I wished she'd been among my family's orbit as we were there at the relevant time. Alas. Baker's trip to the maternity "home" as it was so wrongly called is designed to cast shadows over her family's star as she falls from grace so she can still be useful to them:

They love her, they're proud of her—and they need her. And that's why no one can know what is really going on. Brilliant young Baker is their ticket, the proof to everyone that their little family has made it, will make it. The future is bright, because their daughter is bright. No one else in this family has gone to college. Baker is going to life them to a new level. This has always been the plan.

The emotional register of the entire novel is in that passage. This extraordinary, exceptional young woman isn't allowed any autonomy, any agency, afforded any support for expressing her own desires or needs. It was a different time, though, right?

How different remains to be seen.

The condescending (at best), judgmental (more usually), shame-dealing (always) hierarchy of Baker's "home" atmosphere keeps all its inmates uninformed as to their own body's workings by doctors refusing to discuss the progress of the pregnancies they're all undergoing, to discuss the realities of giving birth; of course, they're also misinformed and misled about their legal rights as a matter of course. What use instructing these girls in the illusion of legal rights when they all disappear as soon as she marries? No sense giving girls who already showed "poor judgment" by getting pregnant...clearly placing all blame on her, none on the male who was of necessity there at the time...in "rights" she might try to exercise against her husband's will.

It makes me angry even typing it. It made me panther-screechingly furious as I was reading the book. At least the abuse Baker has to endure is not physical as well as psychological. Undermining her confidence and booby-trapping her self-esteem with real, unexaggerated Hitchcockian gaslighting were not compounded by Dickensian-poorhouse deprivational cruelty. Small mercies, I suppose, loom large when the injustice of a situation is so star and so terrible.

As her due date approaches, Baker begins to use her reporting skills to keep herself sane in a place that isn't sane. She discovers there are darker patches than hers in her family's past. It's a well-handled side quest that reveals the seemingly immutable law that no surface is a real gauge of how the structure underneath is supported. It's almost always a lot more ramshackle and surprisingly at variance with appearances. A story at once familiar to me on generational axes while being at wild variance with my own privileged-male upbringing, Author Schatz's adaptation of a common story was inspired by her own mother's life story. I found the read engaging, enraging, and enlightening, as Baker brought home to me the personal and emotional realities of the absence of agency women are being forced back into.

No one with a daughter, a niece, a sister, or a mother should fail to engage with this story's emotional underpinnings. In Author Schatz's telling, the story of an unlucky young woman's odyssey through a cruel, indifferent-to-her system paying alone for a "sin" she did not commit alone, is edifying and devastating by turns. It is a must-read.

CLUTCH, verb or noun...you decide

CLUTCH
EMILY NEMENS
Zando / Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I wanted to love this story.

I did not love this story. I *made* myself finish it. I was pissed off at these privileged women taking their genuine, and genuinely intractable, problems so utterly seriously. There was no perspective checking; no one said to Gregg, for example, "you can fix this personal issue if you're willing to reframe your worries about it," no one said "Reba, there are other ways to get this thing you want quit fixating on it as a failure."

When you've known each other for decades, you ought to be able to say stuff like that. You ought to be the perspective-checkers in each others' lives, as a privilege of the groups' friendship longevity. It ought to be relatively easy to see the solution your bud's ignoring or unaware she should give more thought to. But all five of these women are self-absorbed so don't make that kind of effort.

I finished all eleventy bajillion pages because I really liked Author Nemes' use of stream-of-consciousness narration, as it gave me the immediacy that saved the story from permanent exile. I might not've liked the women but I sure knew them. I was not at all convinced these women would make the terrible choices they did in their men. Not one of the men was worth the powder it would take to blow him up. That's very unlikely; these are high-powered women, educated, smart; they would not *all* have fallen for the idiotic, nasty men portrayed here.

I've read many versions of this gang o' pals narrative before. I was not sold on the merits of this iteration of that evergreen story. I really wanted to be.

SALEM'S CIPHER, or "What the Patriarch Will Stoop to"

SALEM'S CIPHER
JESS LOUREY
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubled codebreaker faces an epic plot reaching back through centuries of America's secret history


Salem Wiley is a genius cryptanalyst, courted by the world's top security agencies ever since making a breakthrough discovery in her field of quantum computing. She's also an agoraphobe, shackled to a narrow routine by her fear of public places. When her mother's disappearance is linked to a plot to assassinate the country's first viable female presidential candidate, Salem finds herself both target and detective in a modern-day witch hunt.

Drawn into a labyrinth of messages encrypted by Emily Dickinson and centuries-old codes tucked inside the Beale Cipher, Salem begins to uncover the truth: an ancient and ruthless group is hell-bent on ruling the world, and only a select group of women stands in its way.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Secret history novels are always fun for me...they put a spin on the facts that usually makes very little sense, but has the lovely quality of being off-the-wall...and this outing into that garden of fantasy is no disappointment.

If James Rollins had written a woman-centered story, this is what it would feel like. Since I like James Rollins, I think of that as a compliment. Salem and Bel, with their matrilineal cultish secret society, The Underground, are in opposition to the male-dominated world-spanning cult, The Order...don't you love the harkening back to the antique world's division of authority into women/Earth::men/land?...each side ready to lie, cheat, and kill to accomplish their goals. The two (so far) stories in Salems world make it clear that the nightmare of christian nationalism and fascistic order/totalitarianism are only going to be effectively opposed by women organizing and taking their power back into their own hands.

This being a message I am totally on board with, I say go get you a copy and learn what one intelligent, observant woman thinks is worth fighting for, and how to do it. I won't say it's a roadmap since we live in mundane reality not Conspiracytopia, but I will say I agree that the stakes are existential.

When the next woman is nominated to run for president I will not be surprised if she faces some sort of threat very similar to this story's plot. There is no reason to think that the incels and MAGAts will change in the next four years. I hope that somewhere there is an actual real-life cabal of powerful women ready to blast the patriarchy that will come gunning for her. If they had the quasi-mystical powers that the Underground...do you not just love the echoes of Persephone in that name?...and if they could just use Emily Dickinsons poetry a a cipher, too....

The idea of power in the hands of women scares some men so badly that they will stoop to anything to stop it from occurring. This being amply demonstrated by the events of 2016, when the first version of this book came out, the anxiety that propeled this story reads as relevant today as it ever has. Absent some Great Dismantling of the patriarchy, the plot of this story will remain evergreen.

An excellent investment of a minimal amount of money, for very solid return of pleasure in the read.