Reviews
* 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.
Aud Torvingen is...
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
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