Under the Mink – Image via Amazon.com

Sexy, funny, suspenseful, romantic, heartbreaking- Lisa E. Davis’s thriller “Under the Mink” packs a lot of punches into a slim novel. “Under the Mink” takes place in 1949 and stars Blackie Cole – a sexy dapper boi singer/entertainer. Blackie plies her trade at Greenwich Village hotspot “The Candy Box”, which is run by mob boss, Stevie. When Blackie becomes a witness to a violent murder of a gay socialite at The Candy Box, her life is turned upside down.  Blackie, motivated to find the killer, is led down a path that changes the course of her life forever.

Personally, my favorite part of the book was the love triangle between Blackie Cole, her new crush, Didi Fletcher-Payne and her abusive alcoholic ex-girlfriend, Renee. Just because good, old-fashioned dyke drama is always fun. Davis also peppers the book with pictures of dapper butch performers and their dames, and that really helps bring Blackie, Didi and Renee to life.

The mob also plays a large part in this story, as Stevie is both Blackie’s protector and her biggest threat. “Under the Mink” was heavily researched through interviews with performers of the era and Davis perfectly captures the symbiotic but perilous partnership between LGBT performers and the mob. It’s an important piece of LGBT history that is often overlooked. Davis sheds light on it without being heavy handed or melodramatic. She describes Stevie’s frustration over not being able to pimp Blackie out to men after shows, due to her unwillingness to become a prostitute. Davis also details the butch lesbians who gave blowjobs to patrons of the bar after the show and the femmes that were recruited into bordellos. The fictional Candy Box operated much like the non-fictional queer nightclubs at the time gave queer men and women a place to express themselves, earn a living and perform in drag, but Davis doesn’t shy away from the fact that this freedom came at a cost.

Image via Vice.com

Davis’s research also manifests itself in the vivid descriptions of 1949’s New York City. The politics are on point and prejudices intact. The dialogue is snappy and pops with 40s era colloquialisms, which are fun and innocent sounding in 2015. But make no mistake, “Under the Mink” is anything but innocent. Davis takes on homophobia, prostitution, alcoholism, racism and murder- dressing it up in a gay tone and lots of slapstick hijinks…Oh! And a ton of sex. If you’re into that sort of thing.

“Under the Mink” is a great as a summer beach read or morning commute page-turner. Just make sure you don’t miss your subway stop!

Pick up a copy of “Under the Mink” here and stay tuned for our interview with Lisa E. Davis!

The post Review of Lesbian Thriller “Under the Mink” by Lisa E. Davis first appeared on Lesbian.com.

“Brooklyn Love” by Whiskey Blue
Top Shelf Erotica; 1 edition (March 10, 2014)
Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00J8WXIYG

This is an ebook with three stories of literary erotica. And yes, there is such a thing.

In the first story, an anonymous lesbian makes love with a dancer. They spend weekends together. They get all heated up by hours of imaginative sex, then walk in the snow to brunch.

The second is about love between two Sarah Lawrence grad students. They study, read and have sex together until one of them cheats with a cafeteria dyke who tries to make it with as many undergrads as possible. This causes them to break up, of course, but being grad students, addicted to words and each other, they have cyber sex online even though they continue to live right across the hall from each other. Because she couldn’t go on seeing the cheater, after she cheated, right?

The last may be my favorite, titled “Amelia Earhart,” about two women, one from Australia, one from Canada, who move in together in New York for three years, until their visas expire. Something about this one made me want to continue reading.

It’s a very short collection, less than fifty pages. It is well written. And hot, of course.

The post ‘Brooklyn Love’ spins three tales of literary erotica first appeared on Lesbian.com.

“The Last Conception” by Gabriel Constans
Melange Books
July 2014
ISBN 978-1-61235-876-5
175 pages

This is the story of Savarna, an embryologist, her traditional Indian parents Davidia and Mira Sikand, who desperately want Saverna to conceive a child as soon as possible, the efforts of couples to conceive in any of the technological or biological ways, and it is a love story mixed with a mystery worthy of “The Da Vinci Code.”

As the back cover states, this is a story of love, persuasion and choice.

Savarna is dating two women, hasn’t told her conservative parents she is gay and must listen to endless appeals for her to get married and have a baby.

After deciding she loves Charley, the woman who has waited patiently for Savarna to get ready to settle down, Savarna begins to listen to her own biological clock. When her parents accept her coming out then increase the pressure to have a baby, she can’t quite understand why they are so insistent.

Thus begins “The Da Vinci Code” part of the story. Her parents belong to a secretive religious group that meets once a year in southern India. As it turns out, Savarna is the last viable option for continuing a direct line of descent from the group cult’s original leader.

Her grandmother flies in from India with tangible proof, in an ancient iron cask, a robe and a gold ring. Savarna still doesn’t quite believe until she goes to India to meet members of the group for herself.

Since she and Charley want to have a baby anyway, she begins artificial inseminations, and progresses through all the dreary and heart-wrenching steps all couples climb who have difficulty conceiving.

After in vitro fertilization fails, Savarna and Charley decide to adopt and begin the process for that. The parents are angry and disappointed, pleading with Savarna to keep trying to conceive.

So there you have it. Part love story, part mysterious cult-religious blathering, part “We’re lesbians, let’s have a baby.” The creepy thing is that while reading this book, I kept trying to turn it into some sort of futuristic, sci fi, time warp thing. I don’t know why; probably just me.
The mystery part is not satisfactorily resolved, and the baby conception story really isn’t either.

The post ‘The Last Conception’ book review first appeared on Lesbian.com.

We fans of Kate Delafield have waited nine long years for the next installment in Katherine V. Forrest’s acclaimed detective series. It is here. “High Desert” finds Delafield five months into retirement, alone and sinking fast. Her life partner of two decades, Aimee, is gone. Her best friend Maggie is fighting a losing battle against cancer, and her former commander Captain Walcott informs Kate that her former partner on the job, Joe Cameron, is missing.

Captain Walcott offers Kate two things that may right her sinking ship, a business card for a woman from Kate’s past who once helped her, and could again, and a job: Find Joe Cameron before officialdom steps in.

Kate takes the job and the card, and begins a desperate race to catch the wind and fill the sails, so to speak: Kate is determined to be there for Maggie, she vows to find Joe and get him out of whatever trouble he may face and she also tries again to get the help she needs for herself.

As the facts start coming in about Joe, tension builds. Maggie takes a turn for the worse, and Kate wants to help her, but can’t. Joe’s situation begins to look like a life and death situation in the desert. Kate somehow manages, with little sleep and almost no time, to squeeze in visits with the woman who once helped her.

Of course, there is the usual Kate-too-stubborn-for-her-own-good, blind-to-the-facts approach she takes to personal issues versus the all-seeing range of Kate the professional. But dealing with Joe’s disappearance, is that personal or professional? Those lines cross, and Kate begins to see things in focus, in the high desert, in the hospice home, in her visits with the woman from her past.

Once again, we have a Kate who is sluggish, if not deliberately resistant, to helping herself, refusing to do anything to improve her life, while putting others first.

The timeline shortens, for Joe’s situation, for Maggie, for Kate. The resolution leaves the reader wanting more. Another Delafield book, please.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee,” and “What’s Best for Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: Review of ‘High Desert’ by Katherine V. Forrest first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY HEATHER BENNETT

Sarah Westwood is a copywriter and writes columns for Diva magazine. She began writing a blog about her own insecurities in a blog and after meeting with Diva magazine she got a monthly column. The book came out December 2013 and is available on Kindle. Sarah pokes fun about her coming out at age 30, Bush being in office, people still thinking she was straight, being scared of the lesbian scene, and constantly having to come out on a daily basis. Every page has humor and almost something you or your friends can relate to.

There are chapters about sex toys, sex dreams, gaydars, lesbian bars, not gay enough, mattress shopping and lesbian networking. There are funny comments and stories that will make you remember something similar to you or someone you know. Once you read this book you will be a fan.

Read more at Curve

Curve, the nation’s best-selling lesbian magazine, spotlights all that is fresh, funny, exciting, controversial and cutting-edge in our community.

The post ‘The Rubbish Lesbian’ is anything but rubbish first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY BETT NORRIS

Bywater Books has done a good thing. They just published two Ellen Hart books, bringing them home to the lesbian literature world. Hart has written twenty eight crime novels, in two series, published in the mainstream (read: straight) world. She has received more accolades than any other writer of lesbian fiction, including five Lambda Literary awards. Yet her works remain under-read in the LGBT community. Hopefully, having two of her books from the Jane Lawless series published by a lesbian press will garner the readership Ms. Hart should, in my opinion, receive from our community.

The Mirror and the Mask

Jane, owner of two restaurants and about to open a third, seems restless and bored. A recent breakup can do that to you. Drunk-calling her ex is not good. So when Annie Archer falls into her life, seeking part-time work and help finding her long lost father, the chance for distraction is just what Jane needs.

Annie is not as honest as she at first seems. Jane discovers discrepancies rather early, but continues to help Annie, unravel the story around her father… and before you know it, someone winds up dead. It looks like an accident, but autopsy and forensics define it as murder.

Nothing is what it seems to be in this most subtle of character driven mysteries. It is a product of great writing that the reader can make a case for each of the suspects, and never really knows for certain what happened. The denouement, full of action with guns and kidnapping going on, leaves you almost sure we have the whole story. The characterizations are what makes this tale of crime, assumed identities and unclear motives work. Is Annie a good witch or a bad witch? Which one of the suspects, each of whom has motive, really had the guts to go through with murder?

The Cruel Ever After

Jane Lawless, restauranteur and sometime private investigator, full time lesbian, is shocked when her ex-husband Chester shows up in Minneapolis. Yes, to the great surprise of everyone who knows her, Jane was once married, briefly, to a man. In a scheme to get his inheritance, Chester and Jane agreed to a marriage of convenience, which left Jane with a payment for her service large enough to start her first restaurant. Chester left town with his fortune, and Jane received divorce papers in the mail.

Chester is a man of schemes and fortunes lost and won. His reappearance coincides with his latest deal to sell stolen artifacts from the Baghdad museum to get back on his feet and build another fortune. The problem is the dead body he woke up with. When a second dead body turns up, he is arrested for murder. Chester turns to Jane to get him out of jail and clear his name.

Who is behind the killing of anyone who gets involved with the stolen art?

Remember The Maltese Falcon? The book, not the movie. One of the first “hard-boiled” mysteries, written by Dashiell Hammett, with the private dick Sam Spade. “The Cruel Ever After” pays homage to the great book and to the genre itself. This is a tail-chasing, fast paced whodunnit of the first order.

These two books by Ellen Hart should get you hooked on her writing, which is delightful, and on the Jane Lawless series too. There are twenty of them. Ellen Hart is a little known treasure, much like the the bull stolen from the museum, now come home to us. Hart is prolific, she is tireless in spreading the word about lesbian literature as she makes frequent appearances at libraries, and she is good. She has done her due diligence in making inroads into the mainstream. You will not find characters more deftly and finely drawn than in “The Mirror and the Mask.” You will be on the edge of your seat with all the twists and turns in “The Cruel Ever After.” Do yourself a favor and get both at once, enjoy, and do a good thing by helping make Ellen Hart’s work as well known and loved as it deserves to be within the pantheon of lesbian literature.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee,” and “What’s Best for Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: Two mysteries by Ellen Hart first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Stay tuned for details!

BY BETT NORRIS
Lesbian.com

*Spoiler Alert!* This review gives you a sneak preview of the plot of Superior. Prefer to be surprised when you read it? Check out our interview with Zoe Amos.

This short novel from Zoe Amos takes place in a dystopian society at some point in the future. The action takes place seven years after Civil War II, and a new country, the Superior Protectorate, has been established as a buffer zone between the now fragmented United States and Canada. Miss Kristian Browne has grown up and graduated from school. It is time for her to be sent to a farm camp for two years, along with her best friend Miss Rhona. The farm camp is run like an Israeli kibbutz, and Kristian is assigned to work with the mechanics, while Rhona works in the lab. At first the two girls are happy with their lot and don’t question that in two years, they will be forced to marry, either a man of their own choosing, or through a requested arrangement of the Protectorate. As they grow closer and begin to explore a physical relationship, First Miss Rhona and then Miss Kristian fantasize about running away and living together as a couple, something that is forbidden by the Protectorate. If their relationship is discovered, they will be separated and punished.

Rhona is stalked and harassed by a fellow worker and Kristian draws the romantic attention from a man. Eventually, the girls’ relationship is discovered and Kristian and Rhona are indeed separated. What happens next? You’ll have to read it to find out!

I found this novel to be engaging in both its style and content. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that a state like Michigan, where the governor has appointed managers to take over several city governments and elected officials have been stripped of their offices, could be a model for all that happens in this futuristic tale. Citizens of the Protectorate have microchips embedded under the skin so that they can be monitored and tracked. So much easier than allowing the NSA to hack all our phones, right? And people being forced into straight marriages, that could never happen. Being forced to flee one’s homeland simply because of love shared between two women or two men, that’s just fantasy. Of course.

I found the writing and the pace quite engaging. The story is interesting even if you don’t draw parallels to present day politics, but I sure had fun doing that.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee,” and “What’s Best for Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: Review of ‘Superior’ by Zoe Amos first appeared on Lesbian.com.

This review is the third in a series of three by Bett Norris: something old, something new, something timeless. Read her reviews for “Giraffe People” and “The Mandrake Broom.”

“Shoulders: A Novel” by Georgia Cotrell is published by Firebrand Books.

This is an old novel, first in print in 1987, which makes it one of the first of a new genre, lesbian romance fiction. After twenty six years, it stands the test of time, and is still one of the very best written in this category.

Tired of reading the same plot, again and again? The standard is girl meets girl, falls or tries to resist falling in love, discovers obstacles both very real and those also somewhat whimsical, eventually overcoming and getting the girl of her dreams in the end, with just the right blend of romance, sensuality, and sex to keep the pages turning. Settings in unusual locales help stir interest. Interesting occupations and professions and character traits pique curiosity.

Basically, a love story is a love story. This book is unique in many respects. First, the writing is exceptionally fine. Next, there is more humor here than one would expect. Point of view is first person, as the protagonist looks back fondly, sometimes painfully, and tells her own love story.

I’ll say it again: very fine writing, great good humor, and this novel survives the passage of time very well. It reads like an old, dear friend.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee,” and “What’s Best for Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: ‘Shoulders’ by Georgia Cotrell first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Suzy Becker’s book “One Good Egg” (ISBN-13: 978-1608192762) out on Bloomsbury USA.

BY BETT NORRIS
Lesbian.com

“One Good Egg” by Suzy Becker is published by Bloomsbury USA.

All the rage these days, graphic novels, I mean. Lesbians trying to get pregnant? That’s just a stereotype, right, since the days of “Queer as Folk,” and before.

Here’s the new thing. The freaking Supreme Court just struck down DOMA, people of our ilk are getting married and having children, and our kids are just like everyone else’s kids now. What a world.

Becker’s illustrated memoir takes us along on the very funny, very intimate, four-year journey to have a baby. All’s well, people. No sad endings. Keep moving, those who like to watch train wrecks. This is a humorous, very moving and extremely close look at what millions of women who struggle with trying to conceive go through.

Becker, whose previous books include “I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?” (seriously, I just wanted to throw out that title) takes us through each hilarious and heart-wrenching step, from deciding at age thirty-nine, single after a breakup, to go ahead and have a baby on her own. She shares such awkward and funny moments as asking her best friend to be her sperm donor (imagine that silence after she popped the question) through all the steps, stages, trials and errors that follow, including finding a partner and getting married, storing sperm in a sperm bank, inseminating at home 101, all the way to hormone therapy and manipulation of follicles, to IVF (I love that I know what these acronyms are now) to heart-wrenching miscarriage, to success.

I have never wanted to have a baby, never wanted to be a parent. At all. So those of you who might be thinking this book is not for you are just wrong. You will love it, the humor, the illustrations, the situations so laden with absurdity and vulnerability that you must laugh to prevent the tears. And yea! Happy ending. The one good egg.

Um, in case that didn’t sway you to purchase this book immediately, there are dogs in it. Still no?

It’s funny. I did mention the humor and the illustrations? The almost farcical circumstances that arise?

This is a great book to give for Mother’s Day, to friends who are thinking about having babies, to old lesbians who never considered it, to dads, and to your adult kids, to show them how much they are wanted and loved.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee” and “What’s Best For Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: Review of ‘One Good Egg’ first appeared on Lesbian.com.

This review is the second in a series of three reviews by Bett Norris: something old, something new, something timeless. Read the first instalment, the review for “Giraffe People,” here.

“The Mandrake Broom” by Jess Wells is published by Firebrand Books.

Excellent novel, great historical fiction. I highly recommend this book. It works as a quest, a thriller, an action adventure set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the time of the Plague, the Inquisition, witch burnings, the Middle Ages. Wells dramatizes one woman’s courageous fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning era. Set in Europe in 1465-1540, The Mandrake Broom follows Luccia Alimenti as she fights the forces that attempt to keep medical knowledge out of the hands of women.

This is beautiful writing with great tension and pace. It really kept me plugged in, pulling for the protagonists, aching for them really. Great characters. This is the best historical fiction I’ve read in a very long time. Wells made the urgency of the time come alive.

Bett Norris is the author of “Miss McGhee,” and “What’s Best for Jane.”

The post Lez get literary: ‘The Mandrake Broom’ by Jess Wells first appeared on Lesbian.com.