General Fiction Books

Women. Crime. Justice. At least the search for it. On the mean streets, the back allies, the dark corners.

These are stories of tough women in hard places. The nights are long, the women are fast, and danger is always a short block or quick minute away. Edited by award winning author/editors J.M. Redmann and Greg Herren, Women of the Mean Streets is an anthology of some of the top, tough women crime writers today, noir stories with a lesbian twist.

What do you do when you fall through the loopholes in the system and all you have to rely on are your own wits?

Lois and Sophie have scrambled and saved for years, planning for their retirement in Florida. But now they've lost it all, and Lois's sniper training from her long-ago service as an Army nurse leads to a desperate career choice.

When Detective Morgan Holiday is assigned to investigate a spate of sniper killings, it's just one more stress point in her already overburdened life. But as she grows increasingly solitary—coping with an Alzheimer's-plagued mother who refuses to be confined to a nursing home, and a police partner counting the days to retirement—she comes to realize that these murders may cut close to home.

A modern morality tale of justice, retribution, and women who refuse to be politely invisible.

Can Ros Wynne, who has lost everything she thought defined her, find her true life— and her true love—surrounded by the lingering history of the once-grand Winter Manor?

When Ros unexpectedly inherits Winter Manor on the condition that she oversee the restoration of the remote and dilapidated house, it seems the perfect place for her to retreat from her recently failed relationship, the death of her mother, and the loss of her job. But Winter Manor is not entirely at rest. The echoes of its past reach forward into the present, and Ros's life is perceptibly shaped by the lives—and loves—of the people who inhabited those rooms and corridors in the centuries before her.

Then Anna arrives. The architect—with her designer clothes, hot car, and air of supreme professionalism—is at first an unwelcome, if necessary, intrusion. But as Ros learns Anna's truths, she finds solace from her past losses in their developing intimacy. And when their love is threatened, Ros must decide whether her own ghosts will forever define her, or if she can embrace her life for what it is—past, present, and future.

Freshly out of college and possibly in love, Brianna Bell, aka Bean, worries that she'll never be able to have a normal relationship due to her screwy upbringing. Her parents form a perfect triangle: Mom, Dad, and her mother's lover—who also happens to be her Dad's twin sister. The animosity between the twins is a valley of landmines. When her mom, Maye, is threatened with a rare and possibly fatal illness, she begs Bean to help heal the rift between brother and sister. Reluctantly, Bean tries. But the more Bean finds out about her parents' complicated history, the more she realizes how little she knows.

Two women, Elizabeth and Jen, separated by two hundred years, but inescapably connected. Will the echoes of the past be enough to save Jen as she begins to discover her truth?

In 1808 Elizabeth Cooper, found guilty as a thief, is sentenced to hang and thrown into prison, the convicted women with whom she shares her gloomy cell the only solace she will have until the day of her execution. In gentle Gilly Stevens she finds the strength and comfort of a growing intimacy. As the horrors of the prison threaten to overwhelm her, Elizabeth and Gilly must soon fight to ensure Elizabeth's innocence, her truth, can survive into the future.

In 2008 Jen is a costumed tour guide, the prison where Elizabeth Cooper was imprisoned now an atmospheric museum. Jen's work relating its horrors distracts her from the confusion of her personal life. Then she encounters Aly, an intriguing, confident photographer, who seems to change everything. Jen is determined not to deny her truth any longer and to finally reach for happiness, but, as the shadows within the high prison walls lengthen and seem to warn her of the threat, she is in more danger than she realizes.

To embrace the future is to find the courage to accept the past.

Judith Hilford flees from an emotionally abusive relationship and accepts temporary lodging arranged by a friend until she can set her life on a new course. Lizzy Mayfield, a filmmaker who lost her lover three years ago, comes home from a business trip to find Judith and her child unexpectedly living in her apartment.

Lizzy wants nothing more than to be left alone, but as Judith has nowhere else to go, Lizzy allows her to stay. While Judith struggles to create a new life for her daughter and herself, Lizzy contends with the vibrancy their presence brings to her emotionally barren existence. As Lizzy and Judith gradually become involved in each other's lives, they are both forced to confront the ghosts of their pasts.

Is the history of a dangerous love affair destined to be repeated?

At the height of her career, opera singer Katherina Marow is brought crashing down by her father's suicide. Among his effects, she finds his wartime journal and reads the heart-wrenching entries of a soldier in Russia and in war-torn Berlin. She learns the crimes and secrets her father harbored, but cannot condemn him, for while she discovers his demons, she is facing her own. The stage-world she lives in draws her into a lawless ecstatic realm, and she is tempted, as he was, by forces which could destroy her. Has she too made a devil's pact? And if so, will she pay for it, as her father did, with her life?

Jefferson is the lover every woman wants to be—or to have.

Magnetically attractive, athletic, alcoholic, Jefferson is an anchorless innocent wandering through a world of women who can resist her no more than she can resist them. Never lacking a lover, Jefferson knows little of love; brought up on the right side of the tracks, she's drawn to the wild side. Every lesbian has known Jefferson—or is Jefferson.

Not since The Well of Loneliness has there been a lesbian novel of this scope. But much has changed since then...

A story every daughter will recognize, The Reluctant Daughter depicts the struggles of Lydia Pinkowitz to communicate the realities of her life as a lesbian, as a feminist scholar, and as the woman she has become to her mother Doris. After years of hoping to attain her mother's love and acceptance while struggling to live a true and honest life, Lydia eventually acknowledges her mother will never really see her. When Doris develops a life-threatening illness, Lydia is forced to make a life-and-death decision of her own: should she make one final attempt to heal her relationship with her mother or simply let her go?

Eros, art, and gorgeous blasphemy...

Adrianna Borgia, survivor of the Borgia court, presents Michelangelo with the greatest temptations of his life while struggling herself with soul-threatening desires and heresies. Her growing passion for the painter Raphaela Bramante mirrors the sculptor's damnable interest in a castrato in the Sistine choir and in the ideas of secular humanism. Claimed as the epitome of Christian inspiration, Michelangelo's ceiling is revealed as a coup of Eros upon religion, a gorgeous blasphemy and a paean to forbidden love in the very heart of the Church.

Popular novelist Lee Lynch brings us a delightful romp through the world of hard-boiled detectives with her feline characters Sue Slate and Tallulah Mimosa.

A Classic Title - Original Naiad Press Edition. Good condition.

Eadie T. Pratt sets out on a road trip in search of a new life and ends up in the middle of somewhere she never expected.

Start with one independent, urban lesbian who cashes out her life in San Francisco for a secondhand travel trailer and sets off to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in search of a new life. Add to this a broken-down '66 T-bird, a bunch of small-town Texas Baptists, a ton of fried food, and a church scandal. Pepper with a hot love interest and a dash of greed, and what you get is Eadie T. Pratt's road trip gone awry.

A sweeping saga of an impassioned romance set amidst the upheaval of a nation under siege and a way of life threatened with destruction.

The American Civil War creates enemies of lifelong friends and allies of strangers, but no relationship is more unlikely than that of a passionate Northern Unionist and a loyal Virginia sympathizer. Actress and Northerner Jordan Colfax is hired by Allan Pinkerton to spy on behalf of the Union. When she meets Confederate sympathizer, Laura St. Clair, whose father is military aide to Jefferson Davis, the perfect opportunity presents itself. But when the truth about Jordan's real intentions is discovered, their growing love is put to the ultimate test - the result of which could mean the difference between life and death. Can a Southern belle and a Yankee spy overcome their differences or will divided loyalties keep them apart?

From Tidewater Virginia to Washington, D.C., passion and betrayal converge in Civil War Richmond.

Life would be much easier for Rosalind Olchawski if she didn't have to wake up the morning after the fairy tale.

Falling abruptly in love with a much younger drag king, awakening to the passionate madness of life, and breaking barriers, internal and external, are all wonderful things. But the past has a way of lingering and erupting into the present with devastating force, and sometimes love doesn't come with the white picket fence of our dreams. Rosalind's former husband arrives unexpectedly in Buffalo, turning Rosalind's brand new life with her lover Taryn on its head. Paul doesn't know Rosalind has fallen in love with a young woman and moved on with her life, and he wants her back. Will Paul's intrusion destroy him, or the burning new life Rosalind has built?

Sequel to Of Drag Kings and the Wheel of Fate.

Dr. Rosalind Olchawski is an expert on Shakespeare, Nineteenth century poetry, and being the best friend you've ever had. She's been described so often as warm, Rosalind has come to think of herself as a sweater or a pair of mittens.

One night on a blind date at a drag club in downtown Buffalo, Rosalind is mesmerized by the performance of the drag king Taryn. Can a grown woman go mad over a girl who looks like a boy? One night of adventure threatens to tear down everything Rosalind has come to believe about herself.

Of Drag Kings & the Wheel of Fate is a novel about history, sex, drag, paganism, death, and the formation of family. Using an ancient myth reset in the queer community in Buffalo, New York, Smith explores gender fluidity, sexual diversity, and the deeper questions of love and identity that make us who we are.

2nd Edition

Sweet Creek is a story of love, community, and the changing tides of time set in a town where trannies, lesbian cops, aging gay hippies, womyn's landers, and rural couples come in search of a lesbian paradise. Two leftover lesbian hippies, now in their 50s, Donny and Chick run the vegetarian Natural Woman Foods store. In Donny, a black lesbian, and Chick, her lover, Lee Lynch continues to depict the struggles of working class butch lesbians and femmes.

Author Lee Lynch tackles broad themes that affect us all: love, death, gender, and aging in a novel rich with love, friendship, passion, and romance.

In turn of the century San Francisco, two young women fight for love in a world where women are often invisible and passion is the privilege of the powerful.

Kerry O'Shea always handled what life threw at her. Growing up on San Francisco's Barbary Coast, schooled in the streets by her con-man father, she fights to make a place for herself as a cook in the Palace Hotel. Escaping her roots made her plenty tough, but when she meets Beth Hammond, none of her street smarts matters. It's love at first sight, but how can such a love ever be possible?

Beth Hammond is every bit as strong as Kerry and proves it when she talks her domineering father into allowing her to study nursing. Drawn to Kerry in ways she doesn't understand, Beth fears the terrible secret she hides could destroy their relationship before it can even begin.