The story of a quiet women whose life is turned upside down while experiencing menopause is a hilarious dark comedy that will have you rolling in the floor with laughter. Debbi struggles not only with hot flashes, night sweats, and panic attacks, but she also finds herself exploding in fits of unbridled rage. How can she make these symptoms stop?
The ladies in her scrapbooking club, many of whom have also experienced menopause, give her advice on how to survive these tumultuous times, but none of their advice does anything to make the symptoms any better. She accidentally discovers the cure for these maddening symptoms all on her own: murder. Okay, not all on her own. The murdered guy also played a part in helping her to discover this unusual cure.
Jerry, Debbi’s husband, a police officer, is an arrogant jerk who doesn’t understand what his wife is having these weird symptoms at all. He calls his boss, Sergeant Myra Manners, who is also going through menopause, She Who Must Be Obeyed. This brought to mind She by H. Rider Haggard, a book I read many, many years ago. The only thing that I really remember about this book is that takes place in the interior of Africa. She, otherwise known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, is their queen, a terrifying woman that you don’t want to make mad. I found it rather amusing that this was one of Jerry’s nicknames for his boss.
At this time of her life when Debbi most needs support and understanding, he is having an affair. Jerry’s dream as a homicide detective is to catch a serial killer. As bodies start popping up all over Tacoma, Jerry is on the hunt with dreams of finding and putting away this elusive killer. Will Jerry ever figure out that his own wife is the guilty one? And if he does, what will he do to Debbi?
While Jerry is having a fling, leaving Debbi feeling even more unloved, she discovers that she has a talent for modern art paintings that people love and will pay lots of money for. She has always had a dream of being an artist, but not even she is able to read the meanings of her paintings. Andre, a handsome and suave gallery owner, easily reads meaning into the messes Debbie has created out of rage. And Debbi’s paintings sell for lots of money. Will Andre help her find a way out of the rage menopause has created in her life through her art and a relationship with him?
The names of the chapters are funny as well—for example “Hormones, Homeopathics, and Pregnant Mare Urine,” “Coffee Colonics and Lorena Bobbitt,” “Smelly Cars and Dead Dentists”—and only whet your appetite for the hilarity ahead.
I highly recommend this book for any woman whether you are experiencing menopause or not. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I do not recommend murder as a way of dealing with menopause, no matter how much you feel like killing someone. I received an advance review copy of this book from BookSirens and wrote this review voluntarily. If you would like your own copy of this book, I’ve provided an Amazon link for it below.
Amazon Link: The Menopause Murders
Favorite Sentences:
Debbie had a sudden image of Chelsea’s thumbs heating up from the sheer speed of her texting, dark smoke twisting from her purple-painted nails, then her thumbs melting all over the phone in puddles of pink wax.
Even her scream of shock and hurt was silent—like one of those old black-and-white movies in which the woman standing on a corner of a street, her hands gripping the sides of her head like the woman in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.
Debbi pushed the lamp away and stood, wondering what lipstick color Jerry’s girlfriend wore. Adulteress? Sinny-Dipper? Young and Stealing a Husband?
Instead of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, she’d morphed into a slimy, crawly thing you’d find under your trash can when you pulled it away from the curb.
Like some warped, sick fairy tale, menopause ushered in the curse. The beauty transformed into the beast.
New Words Learned:
Cyalume – trademark name for glowsticks
dong quai – an aromatic herb, Angelica sinensis, of the parsley family, native to China and Japan, used to treat menopausal symptoms, premenstrual syndrome, and menstrual irregularity
ennui – a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement
fomented – instigated
obsequious – obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree
patina – an impression or appearance of something
vituperative – bitter and abusive
About the Authors:
Mary Maloney is a menopause survivor who channeled her symptoms into writing this hilarious novel. She always wanted to be a stand-up comic but was too afraid people wouldn’t laugh. She hopes readers will chortle their way through The Menopause Murders. Mary believes humor is the best survival tactic. She has never killed anyone (only in her imagination), and she lived for a time in Washington, where the novel is set. She teamed up with Ed Markel, the funniest guy she knows, to write this novel because he went through menopause with his wife and provides a male perspective (okay, a bad one!) in the character of Jerry. But Ed and Mary both want readers to learn about menopause and the power of determination and choice to not just endure hormones but come out victorious on the other side.
Ed Markel is a retired United States Air Force officer who spent most of his career as a cyber security analyst and consultant. The Menopause Murders is the first fiction he has written that has been published. He believes he is qualified to write about menopause from a man’s point of view because as a husband, he has been through this change of life with his second wife. He says, “My menopause stories don’t seem very funny to me. I remember it being a very scary time for both of us. She would go out somewhere and come home in tears.
“Once she got lost on her way to work at a job she had worked at for over a year. This was in the days before cell phones, so she could not call anyone and ask for directions. She was just terrified. Another time, she came home after being gone for hours and scaring me half to death and said that she had found herself standing in the middle of a grocery aisle, just staring at the things that were on the shelves. She had no idea how long she had been standing there.
“She used to worry that she was having early onset Alzheimer’s Disease and was terrified she would lose her memory altogether.
“Sometimes we were able to see the humor in this craziness. She used to have occasional days in which she said she felt stupid, that she just was not able to think. She once called in to work—she was a social worker at a nursing home—to tell her boss that she couldn’t come to work because she was too stupid to work that day. Her boss said, ‘I don’t think I have ever had anyone call in stupid before.’ Life was like that.
