Stoner McTavish (The First Stoner McTavish Mystery)

Gosh, I'm so predictable. Let me quote from the back: "Lesbian mystery/adventure novel"! I've been seeing books by Dreher in every used bookstore I visit, and I finally bought one last weekend. Luckily, it turned out to be the first.

It was good. Not the most fast-paced thing ever, but with loads of

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great characters, poetic descriptions of the western US landscape, and lots of emotional processing (coming out, homophobia/etc., family issues, abuse, the works---but very well done). It made me miss Colorado, but it doesn't take much to do that. I was slightly surprised to find that I understood almost all the cultural references, considering it was published three years before I was born.

The only real lacks in the book were a more fleshed-out villain and some typesetting errors that made the very clever and fast-paced dialogue difficult to read. (Lots of dropped beginning and ending quotes, speakers not being distinguished so that sometimes I had to reread it and count even and odd lines, and no way to distinguish internal dialogue from third-person-ish description. You know what I mean? When characters talk to themselves in italics? Italics would have been really helpful.)

Not a masterpiece, but it's so cool that books like this exist.

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