The Adventures of Isabel
An Epitome Apartments Mystery
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Book one in a new playful and trope-bending mystery series featuring a queer, nameless amateur detective.
“Candas Jane Dorsey’s terrific mysteries are what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies and the heroine were a pansexual private detective with heart, smarts, and a T-shirt saying MASCARA IS THE NEW NOIR.” — Sarah Smith, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Vanished Child.
Rescued from torpor and poverty by the need to help a good friend deal with the murder of her beloved granddaughter, our downsized-social-worker protagonist and her cat, Bunnywit, are jolted into a harsh, street-wise world of sex, lies, and betrayal, to which they respond with irony, wit, intelligence (except for the cat), and tenacity. With judicious use of the Oxford comma, pop culture trivia, common mystery tropes, and a keen eye for deceit, our protagonist swaggers through the mean streets of — yes, a Canadian city! — and discovers that what seems at first to be just a grotty little street killing is actually the surface of a grandiose and glittering set of criminal schemes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The nameless narrator of this exceptional series launch from SF author Dorsey (Black Wine), a droll mix of mystery and metafiction set in an unnamed Canadian city, is an out-of-work social worker whose unemployment benefits ran out weeks earlier. She's composing a classified ad to offer her sexual services when she gets a call to meet her old friend Hep Pritchard at the morgue. Hep's granddaughter, Madeline, has been murdered. For the police, Madeline is just another dead, druggie prostitute, and pursuing her killer is unlikely to be a priority. Hep asks the narrator to investigate. As a friend remarks, "Hep needs someone who can ask hard questions to people without offending them. Nothing like a registered social worker to do that on an hourly basis." From hanging out on street corners with prostitutes to attending glittering high-society charity balls with billionaire fraudsters, the always game protagonist proves herself to be a first-rate detective. Fans of unconventional mysteries will be richly rewarded.
