Yowza! Fist-slamming physicality beautifully balanced with raised emotional stakes *

Publisher's Description

Aud Torvingen is back--contemporary fiction's toughest, most emotionally complicated noir hero returns to teach a new round of lessons in hard-hitting justice, and to confront new adversaries: her own vulnerability and desire.

The steely shell of Nicola Griffith's seemingly indomitable protagonist Aud Torvingen appears to be cracking. The six-foot-tall fury (who proved in The Blue Place and Stay that she can kill you as easily as look at you) is shaken by the shocking consequences of the self-defense class she's been teaching, and her investigation of what seems to be run-of-the-mill real-estate fraud is turning out to be more than she bargained for.

Always brilliantly intertwines the dramatic episodes of Aud's class with the increasingly complicated investigation that introduces Aud to the limits of self-reliance, and to the scary and beautiful prospect of allowing oneself to depend on other people. What emerges is a thrilling, thoroughly engrossing novel that imbues Griffith's "classic noir hero" (The New York Times Book Review) with an emotional complexity that far exceeds the boundaries of the genre, and will push Griffith to her well-deserved place at the front rank of new-wave literary crime writers.

* Booklist (Starred Review)
Yowza! Griffith's six-foot-tall, cropped-haired heroine Aud Torvingen is back, flying to Washington since she has inherited her father's holdings and must deal with a Seattle real-estate manager who is robbing her blind. She also needs to see her wealthy, diplomat mother and meet her new stepfather. Interspersed are flashbacks of the women's self-defense class she’d taught back home in Atlanta--with unforeseen and deadly results. Griffith deftly parallels the two narrative threads that comment on and complement each other, creating a synergy of action and adrenaline for one of crime fiction's toughest yet most sensual lesbian detectives. Griffith's writing is smart and crisply detailed as she smoothly orchestrates a plot that delivers Aud to the soundstage for an independent film. There, production problems raise her suspicions of sabotage, confirmed when the coffee urn is spiked with a drug cocktail of Ecstacy, magic mushrooms, oxycodone, angel dust, and speed, nearly killing Aud and various crew members. Fist-slamming physicality is beautifully balanced with raised emotional stakes as Griffith dares to take her lethally forceful heroine to a new level.

Seattle Weekly
The sexiest action figure since James Bond, 6 blond feet of sinew, muscle, and bone. She's also an ex-cop, a martial arts instructor, a master carpenter, and a private dick for hire. She's beautiful, she's independently wealthy, she's in perfect shape: she's downright deadly. And sorry guys: she's into girls....

Details
Makes La Femme Nikita look like a Powerpuff Girl.

salon.com
She knows how to fight, kill, survive and think...one of my favorite kick-ass, super-competent, coolheaded, hotblooded, semilegal girls.

Village Voice
...one scary, gorgeous creature...a woman who loses herself in the beauty and balletic control of pure violence...an exceptional woman...a hero as sexy and iconic as television's Xena.

New York Times
A classic noir hero.

The Advocate
Sleek, sexy, and decidedly dangerous--everything a suspense novel heroine should be.

Entertainment Weekly
...an intuitive, old-fashioned sleuth who would do Elmore Leonard proud.

Manda Scott
...a heroine for the modern age, the avenging angel inside us... I promise you, she'll haunt your days long after you've finished the book... she's fast, frightening, startlingly sexy... This is exhilarating stuff.

New York Daily News
...the love child of Smilla and Nikita

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
...charismatic, yet borderline personality

Laurie King
Gives whole new meaning to the phrase "strong woman"...a personification of every woman's secret kick-ass fantasies.

City Pages
...would claim for women the entire spectrum of human behavior, including brutality and its sometime converse, rage.

Publishers Weekly
...tall, blonde, singular...a woman with a very sharp edge...as brutal as she is sensitive...wildly and exuberantly violent...hugely complex and unique.

Seattle Times
Vulnerable, stubborn, honest and engaging, she's as large as life.

Echomagazine
... a terrifying creature...as fascinating and complicated as she is dangerous and frightening

Lambda Book Report
...powerfully dynamic, a detective walking a fine moral line.

mostlyfiction.com
...clearly a woman, just a really different kind of woman.

Awards

• winner, Readers Choice Award

Excerpt

interview 1
(Audio)

interview 2
(Audio)

AfterEllen interview

Nan A. Talese
(Interview)