3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: December 2025

The Whisper Network by Chandler Baker   At the beginning I wasn’t sure about this one, but I stuck with it. It’s about a group of women who work in the legal department of a big corporation when they become aware of a spreadsheet that is circulating in the Dallas community which features men in the local business community who have exhibited bad behavior. These women have all been a victim of their boss, who died, over the course of the story. And they all are struggling with the notion of how or even whether to grieve the guy. And then there's the whole think about whether the boss was murdered or whether he committed suicide and there's an investigation and all 3 of these women are investigated. It’s a story about women fighting for each other and sticking together. I ended up liking this one.

Class Action by Gail Ward Olmsted This is a spin off from her Miranda series. Lennon Gallagher is a law student and mentee of Miranda Quinn. Lennon joins a study group where she encounters the group leader who has stolen a copy of the Constitutional Law exam and tries to get her involved in purchasing it from him. Of course she doesn’t, but she is implicated in it anyway. On top of that, Lennon is financially holding on by her fingertips, her mom is fresh out of prison and is demanding of her time, and her boyfriend doesn’t understand the pressures she’s under in her last semester of law school and trying to finish school, take the bar exam, find a job and a place to live. An awesome story and Olmsted ratcheted up the stakes.

I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb This one was short and sweet, unlike his normal books that are massive. I remember an interview with Wally Lamb where he said that he’d met an elderly woman who read his books, and made the size of them more manageable by tearing out each page after she’d read it. Didn’t have to do that with this one. This is a story of Felix Funicello, he’s a professor of cinema and an older gentleman. He goes to his movie night at the local theatre, and something super odd happens. There are ghosts of women from old Hollywood and they show him movies of his life from when he was a child. He tells us about pivotal moments of his childhood and how they shaped him as an adult and later taught him how to be a supportive and awesome dad to his daughter. A pretty cool story to end the year.