Tish: The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions

Meet Tish Carberry, a woman who treats every day as an opportunity for magnificent disaster. In this gleefully anarchic comic novel, Mary Roberts Rinehart, the queen of the American mystery, turns her sharp eye to something far more dangerous than murder: a middle-aged woman who refuses to behave. Tish and her two maiden aunts, Lizzie and Aggie, embark on what begins as a simple excursion to Morris Valley but quickly spirals into a series of spectacularly ill-advised adventures. When Tish is tasked with looking after the sharp-witted Bettina, things take an even more chaotic turn. There are encounters with a local young man named Jasper, romantic entanglements that would scandalize the neighborhood, and Tish's preferred method of solving problems: climbing behind the wheel of a racing car. Rinehart wrote this as pure comedic escapism, and it delivers. The book is a celebration of women who refuse to shrink, who find community in chaos, and who navigate a world that expects them to be quiet. It's for anyone who wants to spend time with characters who are absolutely, catastrophically ungovernable.