Dead and Blonde by Jean Marcy

Dead and Blonde by Jean Marcy
New Victoria Publishers, 1998

Overview: After their brief but torrid love affair in Cemetery Murders, things have cooled off somewhat between private investigator Meg Darcy and police detective and Norwegian Ice Queen Sarah Lindstrom. Or so Meg thinks until a late night call from Lindstrom; someone has brutally murdered Lindstrom's ex-lover in Lindstrom's bed. Who would dare murder someone right in a cop's house? And maybe more importantly, why was Viv staying with Lindstrom in the first place? As the murder investigation throws Meg back with the woman who drives her mad, she must find a way to balance her conflicting feelings while tracking down a dangerous killer who might be out to murder them both.

My Reaction: While an overall decent mystery, Dead and Blonde did not quite live up to the precedent set in Cemetery Murders. I think it had a lot to do with the slightly less coherent plot and Meg constantly hashing and rehashing her relationship with Lindstrom. Having just lived through a very traumatic experience, both our protagonists are understandably on edge, but not in a way that seemed to move the story along; much of the book felt bogged-down with Meg's internal conflicts and intense sexual frustration, at the risk of eclipsing the mystery. And while relationships and sexual frustration are fun in small doses, the mystery really should be the heart of the story. Dead and Blonde is not Ghost Motel bad (thank God), but it's not rip-roarin' fun either. I'll probably read the next in the series, since it won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery in 2001, but don't feel like you're missing much unless you want to see how Meg and Lindstrom's story progresses.

Meg Darcy Mysteries
Cemetery Murders, 1997
Dead and Blonde, 1998
Mommy Deadest, 2000
A Cold Case of Murder, 2003

Dance of Knives by Donna McMahon

Dance of Knives by Donna McMahon

A Tor Book, 2001.

Overview: In 2108, Klale, which she tells us rhymes with "daily," is a young woman who has run away from the Fisher's Guild to start a new life in Vancouver's Downtown, an island full of "Guildless" people who have neither the duties or protection of citizenship. She finds the KlonDyke, a strip club/bar whose name raised my hopes way too high, and proceeds to be a glowing beacon of naïveté to her newfound friend Toni, the "'Dyke's" bartender with a secret past. She also takes the risk of trusting Blade, a "tool": he was sold as a child to be neurologically twisted into a  blackmailer's slave. Since he is strong enough to kill anyone easily, and also, due to his "training," liable to go berserk under certain circumstances, this is a greater risk than most people would take! While a gang war is in the offing (spoiler--there seem to be more gangsters/corrupt police in the bar than lesbians), most of the book revolves around learning more about the mysterious pasts of Blade and Toni.

My reaction:

I have to say this upfront: one lesbian sex scene, with no real lesbian romance, with one participant  described as “lean[ing] het” by her partner afterwards PLUS more page-time devoted to (disturbing, in my opinion) hetero sex, and the only front-and-center (i.e., plot-driving) weird-but-probably-qualifies-as-romance romance being hetero, does not "lesbian" novel make. (To be fair to whoever tagged it as such on NoveList, there was a lesbian relationship in the backstory, and a supporting character was nominally in a lesbian relationship, but her partner is such a minor character I forgot it for a minute.) Additional disclaimer: I was really rubbed the wrong way by the description of Klale's introduction to Bracken, who self-identifies herself as a "hermy." While Klale initially reads her as a young woman, when she catches a glimpse of what's underneath some sequined panties, she immediately thinks, "She was a he. Well...maybe," and then launches into an analysis of Bracken's body, and "she/he" and "his or her"s for a couple of pages despite a pretty femme presentation. Ultimately, Bracken says either she or he is fine, but then Klale settles on she because Bracken has larger breasts than her! Ugh, moving on.

All that said, as you might have surmised from the overview, I found Klale really too stupid to be interesting. Thankfully, Toni's story is much more compelling, and is delved into over the course of many blissfully Klale-free pages. 

I have to admit that some of Klale's stupidity paid off in a few situations, but it was hard for me to root for her regardless. 

I idly wondered more than once if a lot of my annoyance with Klale had to do with her name; while her legal name is Margaret, she chose Klale because it apparently means "blue" in Chinook, and was a joke about her hair. I still think my original, pre-pronunciation guide pronunciation is more apt: Klale rhymes with "flail." 

Besides these quarrels, I have to say that McMahon is a better writer technically speaking than many of my "meh" books. I just had a hard time with the inconsistent level of world-building (lots of vocabulary didn't entirely distract me from wanting a few more details about what Klale had run from), some creepy sex (let's just say I'm not into seeing anyone get it on with someone who is a mental age of 12), and Klale. 

 

Slow River by Nicola Griffith

Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Ballantine Books, 1995.

Overview: Slow River, winner of a Lambda Literary Award in 1996, follows the life of Lore van de Oest, a young woman whose pedigree means that she is absurdly wealthy and educated in her family’s “bioremediation” technology. After barely surviving a kidnapping, she is taken in by Spanner, a woman who is perfectly content making a living through crime. While the book begins with Lore’s decision to go “straight” (don’t worry, she still loves ladies, though that is not a huge focus of the book), it constantly flips between the four distinct phases of her life: childhood, the kidnapping, her years with Spanner, and her ongoing attempt to start earning an honest living, albeit under an assumed identity.

My reaction: I feel compelled to start this off with a warning to potential readers that a major part of the story is sexual abuse and rape. It’s not an easy read, to be sure, but putting aside the rape and abuse for a moment, it’s got a lot of my favorite scifi elements: start with a dystopic world that doesn’t seem too far-fetched (i.e., each citizen has an identity chip inserted in the web between their thumb and forefinger), add a mystery, political intrigue, interesting technology (Griffith really goes to town with this one, as she describes in great detail the waste treatment technology that the van de Oest family essentially has a monopoly on), and make it a female protagonist (if she’s a lesbian, bonus points!).

I was pleasantly surprised by how elegantly the plotlines intersected, although I really shouldn’t have been, given that I appreciated Griffith’s skill with story in her other two books (The Blue Place and Ammonite) before picking up Slow River. Her supporting characters felt a little two-dimensional at times, but that could be a manifestation of having a character who was afraid to really engage with them. That said, it didn't keep me from turning the pages and counting the minutes to my lunch break so I could read more. (A review on Ammonite is forthcoming--I loved it, but was too lazy to write a review, and now it's been so long I feel like I should reread it.) Ultimately, however, I think it falls into the high end of my decent category for science fiction, especially when I compare it to Ammonite, which I will definitely recommend. 

More on the rating:  I'm finding that it's much easier to find high quality lesbian science fiction and fantasy than mystery, which is why I gave Griffith's mystery The Blue Place a rating of recommended when I read it. It was a hard decision not to extend the same leeway to Slow River, but in the end, the characters (with the exception of Lore) were just not as real to me as the whole cast of Ammonite.