A CRIME OF SECRETS (A Donner & Longstreet Mystery #1) lesbian-led Gilded Age New York series you need to read

A CRIME OF SECRETS (A Donner & Longstreet Mystery #1)
ANN APTAKER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: New York City, 1899.

A city on the cusp of a new century. A city growing taller, faster, a city of new inventions, new ideas—and old dangers on its shadowy streets where crime, misery, and murder lurk.

When Pauline Godfrey, a young woman embodying the coming modern age, is viciously murdered, her throat cut, private inquiry agents Finola “Fin” Donner and Devorah Longstreet must navigate a world of violence and passion, lust and betrayal, where duty is twisted into bitter obedience and love is soiled.

Fin, a tough survivor of the dockside slums, and her beloved companion, the elegant, intellectual socialite Devorah, probe deep into the festering secrets of a family, the rot and corruption of the police department, and the sinister world of the city’s thieves, whores, and thugs to find the killer.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sapphic sleuths in Gilded Age Manhattan? ANN APTAKER penned?! Sign me right the *bleep* up! Do I particularly care whose murder this concerns? Nope! I want the pleasure of watching as Author Aptaker upends the worldview of the hoi polloi with two people who decline to participate in their tedious little black-or-white, top-or-bottom nuanceless tosh.

That, comme d'habitude, she does. *happy sigh*

A new historical fiction crime series is always a welcome development for me.I like the QUILTBAG worlds that they inhabit to come back alive and crack the false front of heteronormative society's homogeneity without our homosexuality into flinders. Author Aptaker has done this before with the Cantor Gold Crimes series in New York's pre-Stonewall art world. They're refreshingly nonconformist and still part of the long mystery novel tradition of upholding ma'at.

I don't use "law and order" here, because cruel, immoral laws are passed daily all over the world, and vicious repressive order maintained by the small-souled pursey-lipped fear-driven fools that abound in every single time period of human history. Ma'at means something altogether more agreeable to me (and I suspect to most others): The rightness and fitness of things in the world; the always joyous sense of your world running well. Ma'at herself is the center of the Afterlife as the one who weighs the dead person's heart against her feather; if the heart is heavier than the feather, that person is utterly expunged; is prevented thereby from participating in an eternal existence of harmony and pleasure. I wonder often how many righteous crusaders for Truth God and Justice will pass this test....

Certainly the outwardly, conformally Proper and Good Citizens in this story won't. How this series will take that inner-vs-outer duality ball and run with it is set up with clarity and simplicity in the choice of main charcters. Fin and Dev are from wildly different milieux, one a rough-and-tumble survivor of the wild and violent streets and the other a Lady of Quality. Very much like Nick and Nora, Author Aptaker's couple are beautifully suited in ways they continue to discover as their time together expands and their experience of each other's kindness and blindness deepens. In this initial outing, the glossy surfaces are just not quite ever matched by smooth underpinnings. Rough exteriors can, and most likely will, smooth out. Long-unquestioned shibboleths fall, leaving no thick coatings of dust just light blurrings of their outlines. It's a gift to be allowed to see a character's growth instead of meeting them fully formed here in the first book. Well chosen, Author Aptaker!

The web of lies and vileness that Fin and Dev unravel in 1899 Manhattan is nothing if not relevant to today's world where misery is considered the proper condition of the poor, the disabled, the Other. The horrible perpetuators of that misery appall and offend these upright people, who subscribe to the ma'at I described above. The fact that they come at it from very different starting points gives rise to some of the most relatable conflicts in the story: Dev feels, for example, the ugly gnaw of jealousy; Fin the hollowness of insecurity. These being inevitable in any long-term relationship, it's good to see them here, and see them seen off by the women...together.

What I most needed on a hot July weekend when going outside was, for multiple reasons, not a great idea. It kept me engaged in, interested by, rooting for, our ma'at-maintaining duo. There's not a lot stronger recommendation I can give you.

5 Snowy Literary Escapes from this Summer of Climate Change Horror

This year most of us Northern Hemisphereans are experiencing unusually hot summers. Sadly, these “unusually” hot temperatures are going to become usual, according to a large majority of scientists across many disciplines. All of us here are avid readers, so we’re familiar with the concept of escape reading. We need to escape this borning reality real bad! What better way than to slink into a fairy tale, a comic strip, a thriller, so long as it’s set in the icy freezing cold?

I live on a boardwalk next to the beach on Long Island. The North Atlantic is never particularly warm to my Gulf of Mexico-trained bones, which is a good thing to me. I watch folks hauling all sorts of sun-avoidance gear to a perfectly sunny spot, where they slather on sunscreen, dig through the ice chest for a cold Diet Coke, and belly-flop on a tacky beach towel, open their beach read in the bright sunshine, and after a sweaty while scooch under the umbrella for a nap. Brightly colored chick-lit, wispy flowery romantic pastels, the occasional red-daubed thriller, all are well represented in the cover art of these about-to-be greasy throwaway tomes. Most of them will be consumed while beached and, assuming they don’t fall victim to the tide, end up in the Little Free Libraries that dot the beach entrances.

Why, I’ve always wondered, don’t these UV absorbers read something more like what they’re drinking? A little brain chill to go with the brain freeze? Permaybehaps a list will help! These are five great choices for the avoidance of this sweltering summer’s record high temperatures, whether tree book or ebook. I myownself recommend tree books for the beach as Kindles and Kobos and Nooks don’t like sand, but I’ve seen many an ereader both come and go seemingly unharmed (mostly those sealed in freezer bags). I hope these suggestions will spark a few other ideas for icy escapes. Leave them in the comments, please, I’m shvitzing over here.


The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is a charming tale of the power of longing to create material results in the world. Like any good fairy tale, the story starts with the pain and regret of a deed undone...in this case the conception and birth of a child...that is causing the characters to drift apart. Their moment of abandon in the first snowstorm of an Alaskan fall leads them to create a snow-child, all unknowingly imbuing the snow with their longing for parenthood and fulfillment.

Be careful what you wish for. There is no such thing as an unmitigated blessing, and there is no certainty in asking the Powers That Be for a boon. It takes a costly lesson (or two or two hundred thousand) to teach us fool mortals this. By the end of The Snow Child, the lessons learned are chilling. Perfect for a day at the beach, or two, or three. At nigh on 400 pages, it’s not a mere afternoon’s pleasure, but a pleasure it is. You’ll never think “it’s snowing” in quite the same blithe way again. $14.99 or less trade paperback edition, ideal for sandy wet beaches.


The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie is a classic-era mystery by one of the world’s most praised and revered mystery writers. First published in 1931, it was a stand-alone tale (no Poirot and his little grey cells! No Marple and her knitting!) of crimes thought buried rising up from their unmarked graves to feed, zombie-like, on the perpetrators in the present day. Sadly, the whole world they inhabit gets to suffer along with the perpetrators; after all, crime doesn’t pay so much as it pays back. The setting of a snowbound country house with bored wealthy guests is chilly enough. When the pieces of the criminal puzzle start coming apart (or together, depending on your perspective), the emotional chills go from the fridge to the freezer.
What an awful place to live in England is...If it isn't snowing or raining or blowing it's misty. And if the sun does shine it's so cold that you can't feel your fingers or toes.
By the time you’ve finished this modest (288 pages) paperback, you’re unlikely to feel your fingers for a few hours. Though in this case it will be from gripping the darn thing so tight in sheer desperation to see why anyone would kill the victim, shifting to a desperate need to know what took someone so long to kill the bastard. $12.99 or less for the beach-friendly trade paperback edition.


The Day After Tomorrow by Whitley Strieber should ring the movie mavens’ dinner bell, seeing as it was made from this early example of cli-fic (climate-change fiction) into a Dennis Quaid vehicle back in the Aughties. A noisy climatologist gets to shout “I toldja so!” as New York City slips from sweltering to snowbound as Mother Earth finally flicks humanity aside like a dog does her fleas. Considering how much faster we now know the ice sheets are melting than was commonly thought in the Aughties, it’s another case of chilly-meets-chilling when you’re baking on the beach towel, dripping Hawaiian Tropic onto the 272 pages of your used paperback, contemplating just how much more likely this scenario seems than it did in 2004. For used it must be, as the book is out of print. That’s good news for the cheapskates among us (me!), since there’s no reason to pay more than $4 for it...and that’s only if you’re too busy/lazy to go shop the used book store and simply order one from Amazon. There are scads.


Ice Hunt by James Rollins is another of the cli-fic thrillers that started to trickle onto bookstore shelves in the Aughties. Rollins might not capture subtleties of human nature or nuances of atmosphere like Henry James or Marcel Proust, but there is not one soul I’ve ever seen peering intently through their sunglasses at Within A Budding Grove or Washington Square. Rollins is a beach-read writer, and does a damn fine job of work in this tale of Arctic derring-do. Ice Station Grendel holds horrifying, grim secrets that were left behind (more like fled from!) by the Soviet creators of the super-secret base, which are detected by stalwart Yankees from Alaska researching how to keep the world from drowning in ice-melt. Will the Noble Americans save the world from the lingering threats of evil old (and very, very cold) Russia? Take the 656-page, $9.99 or less mass-market paperback tour! It’s guaranteed to chill your core.


Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg isn’t cli-fic, but is very cold nonetheless. Smilla is a native Greenlander living in Denmark, where her father was from. Her life in her mother’s world has taught Smilla a thing or two about snow and the stories it tells, as well as about the European world’s insular refusal to see anyone not like them as valuable, real people. (Not like that’s timely or anything...and the book’s 25 years old.) Smilla involves herself in solving the murder of a young Greenlander living in Denmark, since no one there seems all that interested in doing it for her. Her determination not to let this expendable little life go unaccounted for raises many hackles, pokes many sleeping dogs, and never so much as sniffs above-freezing air. An ideal and deeply engrossing leisure read. Even if it’s a re-read for you, a second trip through the complexities of Smilla’s colonial Danish milieu won’t come amiss. Many details snap into focus on a second read on these 480 pages. At $16 or less, the trade paperback is a wee smidge pricey for exposure to sand and suntan lotion, but there was a mass-market paperback that left behind a good million or so copies to be had for pennies. As always, the less energetic shoppers can contact Amazon and spend $4 for a decent copy that won’t be painful to watch float away in the foam, should that nap coincide with an incoming tide.

There. A few ideas to be getting on with for this sweltering weekend. It's already almost 100° heat index here at the beach! Ecccchhhh. Excuse me, I'm booked on a flight to Ushuaia to meet the Antarctica-bound ship. Be back after Mother Nature's hot flashes subside.