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Summary
Summary
Jane Lawless is a woman at a crossroads - her lover has left, she has finally recovered from a vicious attack sustained last year, and the holidays are closing in. With no one to help her ring in the new year, Jane reluctantly agrees to accompany her good friend Cordelia Thorn on a peculiar holiday trip: Cordelia's estranged sister, Broadway star Octavia Thorn, has asked them to attend her wedding.
Octavia getting married is no surprise - she's done it three times before - but her candidate for hubby #4 certainly is. Roland Lester is a reclusive eighty-three-year-old retired Hollywood director, a relic from the golden age of Tinseltown with a controversial past. No one can understand how the two met, much less fell in love. When the bodies start to drop, Jane realizes it might not be love at all that brought the young diva and the aged director together, but something much deeper, and perhaps more sinister.
Delving deep into film history, Jane finds unsettling connections between Roland and a murder that was never solved. Finding out what happened 40 years ago could be the key to unlock the mystery of Octavia's curious marriage, but laying bare such long-buried secrets also promises grave consequences for everyone involved.
Author Notes
Mystery author Ellen Hart was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in August 1949. She received a B. A. in Theology from the Ambassador College in Pasadena, California. She writes the Jane Lawless and the Sophie Greenway series. Five of the Jane Lawless books have won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery. She has also won the Minnesota Book Award for Best Crime Fiction twice. She currently lives in Minneapolis with her life partner.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After discovering a sorority sister drowned near her alma mater, restaurateur Jane Lawless embarks on an investigation to untangle the events that led to Allison Lord's death. Because little evidence exists, the police assume Allison committed suicide; but Jane is somehow convinced that the young woman was murdered. This debut mystery ambitiously raises such issues as fundamentalism, homosexuality, bigotry and psychological torment within the family--it is virtually a novel of ideas. And for the most part, the plot is deftly paced, with occasional snags. But when the murderer is revealed, even though the identity comes as a surprise, the character is among the least developed, inspired or provocative in Hart's cast--so outlandish a culprit that the reader is left unmoved. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A preachy (mostly lesbian issues) first novel centered on the Kappa Alpha Sigma (KAS) sorority on the University of Minnesota campus. When Jane Lawless, alumni advisor to KAS, finds Allison Lord, the social chairman, dead in a clump of river weeds and Det. Trevelyan complacently writing it off as a suicide, she undertakes the investigation herself--interrogating Allison's distraught lover Emily; her chums Sigrid, Maggie, and Susan (not all of whom knew she was gay; some are scandalized); her ex-lover, Milch the busboy, who supposedly met with her on that fateful night and soon is murdered himself; and assorted relatives, instructors, and sorority personnel. A blackmail scare emerges, as well as petty theft and vandalism in the sorority's ""ritual"" room. The brouhaha erupts in a backwoods face-off, during which Jane and her awkward chum Cordelia are held hostage by a demented KAS staff member, but pluckily escape to conclude that prejudice isn't very nice--and neither are most men. All the stereotypes are trotted out: the snooty sorority girl; the closet lesbian; the sensitive, intelligent, loving, caring, perfect lesbian, etc. Earnestly if not engagingly told, and a bit tiresome in its pleas for understanding personal ""choice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
