She Came Too Late (A Womansleuth Mystery) in Lesbian Mysteries

May 21, 2015 Megan added it

Shelves: lesbian-mystery

This is a competently written, pretty well-thought-out mystery, but for some reason it won’t make my favorites list. Let’s see if I can figure out why.

Emma Victor is currently working as a staff member in a woman’s crisis center hotline. A woman she has spoken to only briefly is murdered and Emma feels the need to find out who did it. This is good; a woman’s life has been taken and justice (which seems to be held up at the D.A.’s office) must be served. So Emma gets caught up in the politics of This is a competently written, pretty well-thought-out mystery, but for some reason it won’t make my favorites list. Let’s see if I can figure out why.

Emma Victor is currently working as a staff member in a woman’s crisis center hotline. A woman she has spoken to only briefly is murdered and Emma feels the need to find out who did it. This is good; a woman’s life has been taken and justice (which seems to be held up at the D.A.’s office) must be served. So Emma gets caught up in the politics of a women’s clinic—and in the arms of the clinic’s head research physician, Dr. Frances Cohen. Again good; Frances is a more believable and well-drawn character than most love interests in lesbian fiction. But other than that. . .

I think what disturbed me most about the book was the point of view: first person obsessive. It reads like I did this, I did that, then I went for a walk. Everything that Emma describes she describes with such detail that you want to scream. Now I know that this is fiction, but most—not all—of the details were so minor that no one would have noticed them, much less remember them later. And most—not all—are irrelevant to the story. I feel that Wings could have spent her time better sculpting the mystery and the motives instead of dropping little grains of minute observation into the narrative.

The motives, as I hint above, are iffy and almost incomprehensible, at least to me. Yes, I can understand the cover up, but not the motive behind what has been covered up. So too, although Emma is certainly no dummy and her heart is in the right place, I’m not sure what Dr. Frances Cohen sees in her that makes her fall in love after less than a handful of meetings. And several of the clues to the mystery that set Emma going, come from either dreams (hers or a friend’s) or from séances. Even the catchword in the book’s title (which is repeated throughout the series) is misleading; although there is sex in the book, it does not contain the descriptive orgasmicism I had half expected.

A secondary character, Sue Martinez, is one of the most interesting in the novel. Another potential love interest, she is rejected by Emma after trying to come on to her while she is stoned. Later Sue moves to California to dry out (she is a drug addict and a blackmailer). It seems that Emma will move to California herself in the second book in the series. I would be interested in seeing if she sees Sue again, and what will happen to Dr. Frances. I’m not 100 percent sure, though, that I want to know enough to actually read the book.

Note: This review is included in my book The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors. ...more

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