So Many Books, so Editor Eu at very month OITM recei_ves Eanywhere from two to six books for review, along with dozens of notices of publica- tion and email pleas from self- published authors seeking reviews. ’ lt‘s not always easy to separate the worthwhile from the trash, and even the “trash" can be diverting for a few hours. All of these books hold high potential for beach read- ing, entertaining but not strenuous. Odd Girls Press closed up shop last December and offered , case-lots of four of its recently published titles to nonprofit les- bian—connected organizations. We’ve got two titles: Night Mare. a mystery by Franci McMahon and Gaslight. a memoir by Carol Guess (and. as a pitch and disclo- sure, both are available on our website, www.mountainprideme- dia.org, click on “affiliates"). ln Night Mare the sleuth is Jane Scott, an independently wealthy horse owner who lives in Putney (yes, our Putney). She‘s in the endstage of a relationship with a lipstick lesbian whose closest connection with horses is leather. While writing for the local paper, Jane stumbles on a scam to steal for resale or kill expensive thor- oughbreds for their insurance value. There’s a human murder as well, and Jane is abducted by the horsethieves on their way to Wyoming. She and the title horse (Night Mare) escape and are given shelter and care by a lesbian rancher. Of course, the murderers / horsethieves are caught and Jane is left wondering whether she might want to move out to Wyoming to be with her new love. Mysteries — at least the ones I read, lesbian or not — serve a couple of functions: they restore order in some portion of a disor- dered milieu; and when they are well researched, they teach readers about that milieu, whether it’s drug culture, antiquarian books, reservation life in the southwest, Disney World, or horses. ' Restoring order is reas- suring, if unrealistic. When was the last time you got the answers to why a person died in question- able circumstances? When was the last time you were so closely involved in a person’s life that you would spend time, energy and money to explore your intuition that something about the ‘official story’ just didn’t feel right? We’d like to believe we matter that much to someone, but unless the death-scene anomalies are blatant, motives easy to come by, and/or money at stake, we all go on with Y our lives and hope it never hap- pens to us. Perhaps the most realistic thing about Night Mare is the amount _ofshoulder-shrugging by characters who would rather not be involved. who don’t care about getting answers. But despite them, order is restored. at least in this . corner of the horse world. On a . scale of one to five, I’d give this lesbian mystery a three and a half: an entertaining read. the lesbians are not all ‘good.’ the straight folk aren’t all anti-gay bigots, and I learned something about the eco- nomics of horses. I’m saving my review of Gaslight for another time. ermont’s own New Victoria Publishers (see OITM ‘s September 2002 Community Profile or www.newvictoria.com) has received awards for its groundbreaking feminist nonfic- tion publications, and they’ve pub- lished some good lesbian fiction, too. The two books released last year were both mysteries: She Scoops to Conquer by Robin ’ Brandeis and A Cold Case of Murder by Jean Marcy. There is an apparent sub- genre of lesbian detective story wherein the sleuth, rather than being independently wealthy, is a seriously dysfunctional dyke will- ing to overlook, forget or forgive the most abusive behaviors for a good fuck by an attractive or pow- erful ~ or both — sex object. Brandeis’s sleuth Lane Montgomery is well‘ intentioned — she becomes involved in the mur- der she solves because she insists on pursuing a human-interest story on the innercity murder of an African American adolescent with a stellar reputation. But her brains too ofien end up in her underwear, or rather in the underwear of her main reporting rival Ann Alexander. Alexander steals her photographs of a slumlord doing business on the shady side and in many other ways runs a no- integrity campaign to always get ‘the credit first. I suspect that this first novel was actually an attempt at a romance hidden within a mystery. The mystery is engaging enough, and" Montgomery as a heroine has enough political consciousness and feminist heart to meet New Vic’s “spunky heroine” criterion. But the romance needs a lot of work. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of dysfunctional dyke rela- tionships out there, but this one is so painfully obvious that it detracts from the plot and our willingness to follow the sleuth into danger. I’d rate this mystery as a two. New Vic’s other mystery, A Cold Case of Murder by ‘Jean Marcy’ is the fourth in a series co- written by life partners Marcy Jacobs and Jean Hutchinson, a pair of saftig, middle-aged dykes. Jean is a retired English teacher, and Marcy works at a battered women’s shelter. l’ve read three of the four books in the series. Set in their home territo- ry of St. Louis, the series makes ’ ample use of recognizable land marks: an old brewery, favorite cafes and bars. The sleuth here is Meg Darcy, a private investigator who will eventually inherit her uncle Walter’s agency. The love interest is the emotionally dys- functional dyke cop Sarah Lindstrom. Sometimes they work together on a case and sometimes their interactions swing wildly between bluff and threat, seduc- tion and near-rape. _ The current case begins when an adoptive mom asks Darcy to search for her daughter’s biological mother. It gets compli- cated when the bio—mother’s case turns up as an eight-year-old unsolved murder possibly involv- ing pillars of the community, scions of an old-time brewing .. family. And oh, by the way, the adoptive mom is trying to extri- cate herself from an abusive mar- riage to an ex-cop who is running security for the brewing family. The setting comes into play not only because of St. Louis’s brew- ing past, but also because of the caves under the city. For mostly plausible (though sometimes monomania- cally obsessed) characters, a nice clear writing style, good use of unusual settings, and some I smoothing out of the relationship, I’d score A Cold Case of Murder as a three and a half. ‘ ile on vacation, I naturally went to Wild Iris Books, the local feminist bookstore - there are still a few in existence! Among the batch of books I got were three from Bella Books (www.bellabooks.com), Drifting at the Bottom of the World, Death by the Riverside (first published by New Victoria, by the way), and The Many Deaths of Jocasta. Drifting at the Bottom of the World was written by native Floridian Auden Bailey, who gave up the sun and humidity to explore rec at ie working in Antarctica. It?s not a mystery, except in so far as nearly everyone who goes to that end of the earth has some secret to grap- ple with or escape from. How do we know? Jubilee Oval, an arche- typal storyteller and legendary plow driver, tells us so — their secrets “leak and reek." Sometimes she even tells the secret holder what the problem is", as she does for An (for Angus) Jones, the protagonist. I don’t know how it hap- pens, but nearly every novel I’ve picked up lately has sexual abuse as its revealed secret, warping the lives, relationships and percep- tions of one or more major charac- ters. And it happens even though I consciously avoid books with “family secret” or “past betrayal” or anything connected to sexual abuse in their cover blurbs. But here it is again, with an added twist. Bai1ey’s depiction ofthe characters — and I do mean char- acters — living in the closed socie- ty of a scientific station at the bot- tom of the world is well done maybe just a bit exaggerated for illustrative purposes. The folk sto- ries ‘Jubilee Oval’ crafts. to explain the Antarctic are engaging and lyrical; the interactions of the station staff provide a gritty, real- istic backdrop to stark beauty and fear and the every day possibility of death by nature and human stu- pidity. — . S Drifting at the Bottom of the World deserves the rating of four that I’ll award. Maybe I’m the one who is naive here, but J .M. » _Redmann’s PI Mickey Knight - not to mention her murky picture of near-underworld (not to men- tion nearly underwater) New Orleans — only confirms my inten- tion to stay away from the I Crescent City. It’s not that Knight, a former swamp rat turned Vassar graduate in philosophy (reflecting Redmann’s own geographic and educational history) is unrealistic — especially given that the series began in 1990, when dykes of a certain age might be working out the oppressions of their childhood and young adult lives through drink, drugs, and frequent casual sex with many different partners. But Knight easily quali- fies as one of the most obnoxious dyke detectives I’ve read so far. She drinks away her emotional pain and numbs herself to the car- ing of friends and lovers. She has slept her way through what passes Little Time ., for dyke society — mostly in the law enforcement and medical milieus — and managed to push away anyone who might want to get seriously involved. Every time we read about ‘her thinking, it’s almost all self-pity and her assumptions that others arepitying her too. which her stubborn swamp-rat pride can’t stand. And yet. there’s some- thing there, someone potentially rescuable, a person who might learn —- with some help, which by the end of./ocasta she might get. In the series opener, Death by the Riverside, Knight goes on assignment (as a favor to dyke police detective Joanne Ranson, who could be an object of attraction for the P1) to an import- export company suspected of importing and distributing illegal _.,drugs. The delivery site is next door to the ancestral home of Cordelia James, engaged to be married (but not for long). James, it turns out, is the daughter of the rich and socially well-connected drunk driver who killed Knight’s father and two other people. Bad guys die, good girls and PIs are wounded near unto death (but recover). I The feeling here is the Tennessee Williams-William Faulkner-creepy, crazy, slimy, out- or’-control two-faced South, where everyone is all politeness and smiles on the surface while plot- ting poison and murder under-i neath. Of course it’s a clichéd por- trait, but there would be no cliché if there were no truth to it. The only saving grace is the sometimes grudging but no less real loyalty of the group of lesbians surround- ing Knight. They get impatient with her self-hate and angry at her clumsy, self-protective betrayals. I recognize these friends and fami- ly-of-choice who put up with Knight’s shenanigans. The Many Deaths of Jocasta is the second book of the series and shows Knight beginning to tire of her own self-destruction. Her wealthy mentor (who made college possible after helping Knight escape a money-grubbing, esteem-destroying, falsely pious aunt) hires Knight to run “securi- ty” at her annual spring gay-la. There’s a scream from the woods as a guest discovers the body of a young woman, the apparent victim of a botched abortion. Knight. of course, is in the middle of it, jug- gling the jabs of friends equally tired of her self-destructive ten- dencics, her jealousy of Cordelia’S date, her need to impress police detective Joanne Ranson, and her