1999 lesbian noir crime; second in Griffith's series about Aud
Torvingen. Still shattered by grief from the loss of her true love,
Aud reluctantly goes to New York to look for the missing girlfriend of
an old friend.
Even more than The Blue Place, this is a character study of
Aud. But because she is comprehensively broken by grief, she doesn't
come over as the omnicompetent superheroine of the first book; the
story of her starting to put herself back together and realising that
she can't quite be the person she was before is more interesting than
the story of her being that earlier person.
I mean, yes, there's also a plot; it's just less important than the
character. Aud tracks down the missing Tammy, finds out what's
happened to her, and gets her out. There's one of those terribly
clever sociopaths who are much commoner in stories than in the real
world, but rather than having a long cat-and-mouse game of detection
as we've seen many times before, something else happens, leaving some
very significant loose ends to be tidied up.
Everything is together. That something else happens because of who Aud
is at this point. The missing girlfriend is broken too, but in a
different way from Aud, so they help each other to recover. (And they
don't sleep together; that would be too pat.)
I liked this rather better than the first one, and I liked that quite
a bit.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.