#amateur city

Book Rec: Amateur City, a Kate Delafield Mystery:

Tough and demanding LAPD Detective Kate Delafield is the leader of the investigation into a highrise office building murder. The case is intriguing but routine - until Kate interviews the only witness, Ellen O'Neil.
When Ellen O'Neil took her new job over the objections of her lover, she wasn’t expecting to become embroiled in murder. The curiousity that Kate Delafield rouses is equally unexpected. But it is never far from Ellen’s mind that she is merely a name on an interview sheet to the tight-lipped detective.
Kate’s thin trail of clues are enough to convince her that she is looking for an amateur, and amateurs are notoriously unpredictable and dangerous. She finds her path increasingly intersecting with that of Ellen O'Neil, who is proving unpredictable and dangerous in a far more personal way.

Amateur City is a very important book. Considered the novel to really kick off lesbian detective fiction, we owe Katherine V. Forrest  a great tradition of lesbian detectives.

The book deals with brutal and period accurate depictions of racism, sexism, and homophobia, making it an emotionally difficult read. If you can handle that, it’s definitely worth it.  Katherine V. Forrest paints a clear picture of the horrors of living under heteropatriarchy, but allows the women in her work to triumph despite it.

The cast is fairly large, and although there is no shortage of unpleasant characters, they’re all well established and memorable. Kate Delafield holds up as a tough, interesting, and endearing protagonist, and I’m excited to keep reading about her cases.