Crime & Mystery Books

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.

It's just one more body in one more destroyed house. In New Orleans, after Katrina, there are thousands of destroyed houses and hundreds of body yet to be found. Can one more matter? It does to Micky Knight as she takes on the search to find out who the woman was and why she might have died there. But is Micky searching for justice or just doing anything to avoid confronting the ways Katrina destroyed everything that had tied her to New Orleans?

Micky's investigation leads to a tangle of greed and deceit that stretches back generations. Someone is using the destruction wrought by the flooding to finish what was started a hundred years ago. To stop them Micky will have to risk not just her life, but any chance to reconnect with Cordelia and rebuild the life she had before Katrina. But if she doesn't stop them, a young teen whose only crime was wanting to help the destroyed city, will be the next body left in an abandoned house.

The sixth book in the Micky Knight mystery series.

Among the moss-covered trees and wrought-iron balustrades of southern Louisiana, Detective Michele Knight (Micky to her friends) takes on the seemingly simple job of shooting a few photos for a client, but the going gets rough as Micky finds herself slugging through thugs and slogging through swamps in an attempt to expose a dangerous drug ring. The trail leads to the Hundred Oaks Plantation, a transvestite named Eddie, a beautiful doctor named Cordelia, and memories Micky thought she had buried twenty years ago.

Hard-hitting prose in the style of Sam Spade and Mike Hammer with a lesbian twist.

The First Micky Knight Mystery

"I was forty-six when I left the big city for the Big Easy. They say New Orleans is like a woman, beautiful, deceitful, and deadly. All I know is, I had to leave Los Angeles on the run and The Crescent City beckoned like a broad on her back."

In the sequel to Femme Noir, Nora Delaney has returned to her job as a college basketball coach in Los Angeles. When she beats up a rival coach on national television, she is fired and flees to a tiny town outside New Orleans to take refuge with her cousin Ellis Delaney and his wife. Working at Ellis' pawn shop, Nora meets Cleo Sweetleaf, who becomes a mentor and a second father. While Nora takes stock of her life, her everlasting hunger for strange women causes trouble from sunup to sundown. When Cleo is murdered, Nora, spurred on by revenge, is drawn into solving the crime. But after being beaten and left bleeding in an alley, Nora might not solve the mystery alive.

In the dynamic double sequel to Shield of Justice and A Matter of Trust, Det. Sgt. Rebecca Frye struggles to return to duty after a near fatal shooting. Joining forces with enigmatic computer consultant J.T. Sloan, Rebecca accepts a temporary assignment with a Federal task force investigating an Internet child pornography ring. Rebecca's obsession with finding her partner's killer and her involvement in the multi-jurisdictional investigation threaten both her life and her new relationship with Doctor Catherine Rawlings. When Catherine becomes professionally involved and an attempt on the life of a task force member ensues, the pursuit of justice becomes a deadly race against time.

When the hallowed halls of academia become the stage for murder, newly appointed Dean Beth Ellis's search for the truth leads her to unexpected discoveries about her own heart.

For Beth Ellis, Grafton College and its faculty and students are her home and family. But the president of the college rubs everyone the wrong way, the new English professor on campus isn't much more popular, and Beth has her hands full trying to keep the peace as various campus factions quarrel. Still, she didn't expect a tenure battle to end in murder.

Sally Sullivan left the Chicago police homicide division and returned to her hometown where, as chief of police, she expected her greatest challenges to be dealing with car accidents and drunk drivers. But faced with a murder investigation with more motives than evidence and an inexperienced staff, Sally finds small-town policing isn't as simple as she thought. Neither are her growing feelings for Beth Ellis.

As Sally and Beth's different worlds collide, their desire to solve the murder is complicated by their unexpected attraction. A second murder on campus places the survival of the college itself, their tenuous relationship, and even their lives in jeopardy.

Womanizing tough broad Nora Delaney meets her match in Max Abbott, a sex-crazed dame who may or may not have the information Nora needs to solve a murderbut can she contain her lust for Max long enough to find out?

Dames, booze, and murder is the oldest story in the book, but this time, it happens too fast to Nora Delaney, who is a notorious womanizing college basketball coach. After her ex is found murdered, Nora chases the scent all the way from Los Angeles to Tulsa to find some right angles in this nasty business, only to be waylaid by a gorgeous, gin-swilling skirt who has information as well as an appetite for women like Nora.

Filled with cock-eyed optimism, vivid sexual fantasy, tough broads, and big babes who know their ways around drinks, trash talk, and murder, Femme Noir is a wry homage to retro outlooks of a bygone tough guy/femme fatale age. If you like sex and humor, this book is for you.

New Orleans PI Micky Knight just had to get into a butch pissing contest with the journalist partner of a famous doctor working with her lover, Cordelia James. Micky's insistence that the skills of a reporter are of no use to a PI backfires, and now she's stuck with a drop-dead gorgeous assistant and the case of a dying gay man looking for a child he might have fathered. These chains of events--and an act of nature--will tear Micky's life apart in ways that may never be put back together. Fifth in the Lambda Award-winning Micky Knight mystery series.

While Detective Lt. Rebecca Frye's elite unit attempts to uncover the connection between the local organized crime syndicate and a human trafficking ring, she and her team, and those they love, unwittingly become targets. As part of the operation, Dellon Mitchell goes undercover with a young woman posing as her lover—a woman with a secret agenda who puts Mitchell's personal and professional life at risk. Before long, the hunters and the hunted are caught in a complex web of double-crosses and desire where the lines between good and evil blur, and justice may be the ultimate victim.

Fifth in Radclyffe's Justice Series

Micky Knight, a bayou-bred and out-of-the-closet New Orleans private investigator, takes on the cases of a widowed mother looking for her daughter and a tough gay boy hunting for his biological mother. When a young woman patient is murdered at Dr. Cordelia James's clinic, it seems to be just a bizarre coincidence. But when another woman, also a patient, is murdered, these events reveal the frightening possibility that the crimes are more than just random chances. Even more alarming, the killer seems to know too much about the victims. As the killer circles ever closer to Micky--and the lost daughter she is trying to find--the coincidences become a grisly reality: the one characteristic all the victims share is that they dare to love other women. Reprint

It is fall in the steamy underworld of New Orleans, the seasons are changing, and so is tough detective Micky Knight's life. Micky takes on the case of the daughter of a friend, who is believed to be sexually abused, not knowing that the investigation will lead her on a dangerous sexual odyssey. In Cissy's sleepless nights, Micky sees echoes of her own past, and she becomes caught up in a world where young girls are treated as commodities. While doing battle with seedy thugs and struggling to hold on to her rocky relationship with Dr. Cordelia James, Micky travels between the uptown opulence of the Sans Parel Club, one of New Orleans's exclusive private clubs, and a tawdry hole of a bar near the Desire Projects. Evil exists in both places, and the mystery culminates where law and desire intersect. Reprint

The Lambda Literary Award winning Third Micky Knight Mystery.

Micky Knight, a hard-hitting, tough-talking dyke detective, has been hired to provide security for a party at an old country mansion. It should be easy--a perfect spring evening, mild weather, and women everywhere. Suddenly another woman shows up--brutally murdered, left to die in the surrounding woods. The police find a prime suspect when the body of yet another victim is found in the clinic of Dr. Cordelia James, a woman whom Micky has a very personal reason to defend. Micky struggles against demons, past and present, in her death-defying search for the murderer. (reprint)

In the detective business, the ordinary can quickly become deadly.

When private investigator Yoshi Yakamota and the Blind Eye Detective Agency are hired to find a woman's missing sister, the assignment seems fairly mundane. Then two teens fall to their death from a rocky oceanside cliff in what appears to be a tragic accident. Although the events seem unrelated, they have one thing in common: the controversial Pioneer Institute, a residential ex-gay youth program. Will sending a Blind Eye team member undercover reveal what's behind the school's terrible safety record, or will it just put the spy in harm's way?

Why can't Teague Richfield and the love of her life, psychic astrologer Callie Rivers, get away together without the otherworld following them?

Teague and basset hound Elmo head for Sedona and the sensual arms of Callie Rivers, but their romantic reunion is interrupted by unearthly forces and a dangerous journey into the metaphysical realm. A provocative female shaman from Callie's past involves the duo in shape-shifting, disembodied attacks, the murders of Native American women, and a spiritual battle that takes place on a level even higher than the mystical red rocks of Sedona.

The Four Corners is the perfect place for people escaping from something, and Sheriff's Detective Jude Devine is no exception. But Jude can't afford to dwell on her past—she has too much to think about in the present.

Local benefactor and reclusive millionaire Fabian Maulle has been found murdered. The Aryan Sunrise Stormtroopers are planning a ricin attack on the Telluride Film Festival. The feds have hit town and the sheriff wants Jude to liaise with Aidan Hill, the Special Agent in Charge. But Hill is a straight arrow who thinks Jude is a slacker. Their working relationship is only made worse by a mutual lust neither is willing to acknowledge. Jude is also losing sleep over a friend, Sandy Lonewolf Lane. Sandy, a former paratrooper, is stalked by her past. She's called the Four Corners home since the suicide of her lover, whose son was killed in Iraq. Sandy is planning to assassinate the vice president of the United States, and her determination to carry out her mission, and Jude's to stop her, draws the two women into a lethal game of cat and mouse.

If all that weren't enough, Jude faces a personal dilemma when Dr. Mercy Westmoreland's marriage to actress Elspeth Harwood gets shaky, and Mercy comes looking for consolation.

Book Three in the Jude Devine Mystery Series

The camera doesn't lie, but sometimes it captures a story worth killing for.

When Jeff Conant, the new executive director of San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival, takes a header off the Golden Gate Bridge, he is considered just another statistic—one of the thousands who've leapt from the landmark to commit suicide. But Jeff was also a childhood friend of reporter Velvet Erickson, who refuses to accept the coroner's ruling. Although unconvinced, Yoshi Yakamota reluctantly agrees to investigate Jeff's death. Diving into the victim's life, the Blind Eye Detective Agency uncovers potential suspects, but no real indications of murder.

What did happen on the Golden Gate Bridge that night? Did an independent filmmaker inadvertently capture the event on camera? When a Blind Eye team member is attacked, it becomes painfully clear that someone has a secret worth killing for—and with Yoshi dangerously close to exposing it, they may strike again.

It should have been an average bust. Minimal trouble. Minimal backup.

When police detective Foster Everett witnesses the unspeakable, average becomes deadly. A cover-up ensues and Foster begins numbing herself with alcohol at a neighborhood bar. There she meets Riley Meideros, the one person strong enough to hear Foster's painful secret and not turn away. But like most secrets, Foster's refuse to stay hidden. And like even the most carefully built walls—walls that Riley effortlessly seems to breach—the barricades surrounding Foster soon begin to crumble. Fearing that she's put Riley in danger and fighting against the powerful attraction growing between them, Foster vows to uncover the truth. But someone is determined to keep the truth buried, even if it means silencing Foster and Riley permanently.

2nd Edition

The murdered body of lesbian publisher Rosemary Finney is found on a remote hiking path south of San Francisco. Local police of the wealthy Woodside enclave quickly focus on a prime suspect: Investigative Reporter Velvet Erickson. Velvet appeals to her friend and former lover—private eye Yoshi Yakamota, whose detective skills more than make up for her failing eyesight—for help. Yoshi dedicates the resources of her firm, Blind Eye Detective Agency, to proving her friend's innocence. But every time the investigators rule out one suspect, another takes their place. What has Rosemary Finney done to make so many enemies? And which one did it?