Leisure reading

'The Devil in the Junior League'

By Linda Francis Lee

St. Martin's Press, $22.95.

The author, a Texan who lives in New York City, knows whereof she speaks. She once competed for the "Maid of Cotton" crown — and she is a "seriously seasoned Junior Leaguer." In this satirical novel, she takes the reader deep into Texas blue-blood society.

Fredericka Mercedes Hildebrand Ware belongs to the Junior League of Willow Creek, Texas. When her husband steals her money and runs to places unknown, she would rather the story didn't get out.

She hires Howard Grout, a "tasteless, gold-chain-wearing lawyer" who promises to help her if Frede will help get his "tacky, four-inch-stiletto-and-pink-spandex-wearing wife, Nikki" into the Junior League. — Dennis Lythgoe

'Mortician Diaries'

By June Knights Nadle

Inner Ocean, $13.95 (softcover).

June Nadle is 80 years old and now retired in St. George. For more than 50 years she worked as a mortician. She embalmed, cremated, buried and memorialized the dead. She prepared funerals for homeless people and Hollywood stars.

In this memoir, she shares some of her most memorable encounters — from the uplifting to the strange. She talks about Lucy, the spitfire who planned her own funeral and taught her family the meaning of death; she tells of Mrs. Tohill, the grieving mother who refused to believe her baby had died; and Mary, the woman who held a funeral for her son despite the threat of gang violence.

June also describes her responsibility to be the mortician to her own husband when he died of leukemia at the age of 89. — Dennis Lythgoe

'Blame it on the Rain'

By Laura Lee

Harper, $13.95.

In this book, subtitled "How the Weather Has Changed History," Laura Lee, a former comedian, examines weather phenomena in relationship to major historical events.

This book includes stories of governments that toppled due to weather-induced plagues and religious panics caused by lightning strikes. Lee also looks at the ways temperature affects people's clothing tastes — and discusses the way fables and myths explain tides, floods and winds.

Lee asks whether John F. Kennedy would have been elected president if Election Day 1959 had been a sunny one. If Lee's suggestions were taken at face value, lots of things would have been different. A plethora of other examples abound. — Dennis Lythgoe