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The Adventures of Isabel

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0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: Available soon
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: Available soon

Book one in a new playful and trope-bending mystery series featuring a queer, nameless amateur detective.

"Candas Jane Dorsey's terrific mysteries are what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies and the heroine were a pansexual private detective with heart, smarts, and a T-shirt saying MASCARA IS THE NEW NOIR." — Sarah Smith, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Vanished Child.

Rescued from torpor and poverty by the need to help a good friend deal with the murder of her beloved granddaughter, our downsized-social-worker protagonist and her cat, Bunnywit, are jolted into a harsh, street-wise world of sex, lies, and betrayal, to which they respond with irony, wit, intelligence (except for the cat), and tenacity. With judicious use of the Oxford comma, pop culture trivia, common mystery tropes, and a keen eye for deceit, our protagonist swaggers through the mean streets of — yes, a Canadian city! — and discovers that what seems at first to be just a grotty little street killing is actually the surface of a grandiose and glittering set of criminal schemes.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 24, 2020
      The nameless narrator of this exceptional series launch from SF author Dorsey (Black Wine), a droll mix of mystery and metafiction set in an unnamed Canadian city, is an out-of-work social worker whose unemployment benefits ran out weeks earlier. She’s composing a classified ad to offer her sexual services when she gets a call to meet her old friend Hep Pritchard at the morgue. Hep’s granddaughter, Madeline, has been murdered. For the police, Madeline is just another dead, druggie prostitute, and pursuing her killer is unlikely to be a priority. Hep asks the narrator to investigate. As a friend remarks, “Hep needs someone who can ask hard questions to people without offending them. Nothing like a registered social worker to do that on an hourly basis.” From hanging out on street corners with prostitutes to attending glittering high-society charity balls with billionaire fraudsters, the always game protagonist proves herself to be a first-rate detective. Fans of unconventional mysteries will be richly rewarded. Agent: Wayne Arthurson.

    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2020
      An anonymous investigator delves into a MacGuffin of a murder designed to showcase her outrageous lifestyle. A postmodern girl living in a postmodern world, the unnamed protagonist of Dorsey's series debut is a social worker who thinks about posting a classified ad for sex work in order to make her rent at Epitome Apartments. Although being ambisexual could double her client base, she's dragged out of her fantasy when her powers of observation and general free time are called on to solve a crime. Her neighbor and sort-of-friend, who's nicknamed Hep for her resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, learns that her granddaughter Madeline Pritchard's body has been found in a river and seeks someone who can get to the bottom of things. An actual sex worker, not just one in her head, Maddie had been busy getting off drugs and trying to make something of herself. Who would've wanted to kill someone life had already brought so low? Through a series of facetiously titled chapters--such as "Underwear Is My Baby Tonight?"--the heroine dives into the case, ably supported by the requisite cast of unusual secondary characters. These include her friend and neighbor Denis, described as "the guy the term flaming faggot was invented to describe"; her cat, Fuckwit, whom she tries to rename Bunnywit so as not to offend her relatives; and a homeless woman-turned-potential love interest. The amusement these descriptions inspire may well predict different readers' enjoyment of the whole story. A strained but relentlessly clever read.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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