The first two-thirds are riveting, with mysteries unspooled at a steady pace and believable stepfamily angst, but unfortunately the final act slips into some loopy turns.Д®veryone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Marshal whoвЂ™s familiar with OwenвЂ™s past encourages Hannah to cooperate as Hannah and Bailey find themselves in danger. Bailey does remember Texas, though her memories donвЂ™t track with what Owen had told both of them. Still, Hannah remains uncertain, and after she remembers how a man claimed to have recognized Owen from high school in Austin, Tex., despite Owen having said heвЂ™s from the East Coast, Hannah and Bailey travel there in hopes of triggering BaileyвЂ™s early childhood memories. Bailey and her stepmother, Hannah Hall, arenвЂ™t close, but they work together to uncover what made Owen flee, convinced he is innocent. Owen Michaels, a coder for a prominent tech company, vanishes just before his boss is arrested for corruption, leaving his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey, over half a million dollars in cash. In DaveвЂ™s suspenseful latest (after Hello Sunshine), a Bay Area woman copes with her husbandвЂ™s sudden disappearance. A lexicographer's dream of a novel, this is a lovely book to get lost in, an imaginative love letter to dictionaries.

As Esme confronts sexism in her daily life, she finds solace in the meaning and significance of 'women's words,' which address the female experience. The words that resonate with her range from the profane to the political. 'Instead of storing shovels and rakes, the shed stored words.' Some slips of paper carrying words are misplaced or discarded, and it is these 'lost' words that Esme is determined to rescue from certain oblivion. Motherless Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, the garden shed in the back of the house where her father works for the Scots-born lexicographer James Murray and his monk-like team, who are collecting words for the first edition of the OED.

Do words mean different things to men and women? That is the question at the heart of Williams' thoughtful and gentle first novel based on original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives and set during the women's suffrage movement in England.

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