Martha Miller

“Different is a brave thing to be,” a mother tells her five-year-old daughter. During the 1960s and 1970s, when things for gays and lesbians were starting to change in larger cities, in the Midwest, different was not a safe thing to be. A memorable cast of characters, a sympathetic, believable, tight-knit community of friends and rivals, fill out the interconnected stories with butches, femmes, go-go dancers, and drag queens who try to find their way in an unaccepting culture by becoming a family of choice. Anyone who has ever been on the outside looking in will feel at home on “the levee.”

Reprint

Bertha Brannon is a lawyer who takes care of her grandmother and is usually broke because the work she often takes is pro bono or sliding scale for the domestic violence shelter or the public defender for juvenile cases. She has eighteen months of sobriety from a cocaine addiction. Late Friday afternoon, she's looking forward to a long and peaceful weekend, when a woman comes into her office who wants to retain her for a murder she hasn't yet committed. Bertha needs the rent money. Thus begins a living roller-coaster ride that includes betrayal, arson, and murder. While making trips back to the drug-using haunts, Bertha meets a police woman who wants her, but she's not sure for what. Is it just sex or is there something more?

Prequel to Widow
Reprint!

County Judge Bertha Brannon's life blows up when her partner of twelve years, police sergeant Toni Matulis, the love of her life, is killed during a domestic violence call gone bad. Bertha is still trying to accept what's happened when she gets the first of several threatening phone calls. This is followed by one dangerous incident after the next, one dead body after the last. The police are no help, so Bertha starts her own investigation and learns that Toni was working on a case that no one wanted her to solve, a case of corruption that goes all the way to the top.

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.