Lambda Literary Awards 2006

vom Krimiblogger

Die Finalisten des 18. Lambda Literary Award stehen fest. Jährlich vergibt die Lambda Literary Foundation in den USA den Preis für gute schwule, lesbische, bisexuelle und transgender Literatur. Insgesamt gibt es in diesem Jahr 22 Kategorien, darunter auch die besten schwulen und die besten lesbischen Krimis (Gay Men’s Mystery und Lesbian Mystery). Hier folgen bebildert die Nominierungen in diesen Kategorien, alle weiteren Kategorien finden sich → hier.

Die Nominierungen in folgenden Kategorien:

Gay Men’s Mystery

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D. Travers Scott: One of These Things is Not Like the Others (Verlag: Suspect Thoughts)
Verlagstext:
„You’re your own man,“ Jake Barnes tells himself upon arrival at his father’s isolated cabin in the woods of Oregon. „You are yourself.“ But in the strange world of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other, manhood and self are not to be so easily understood. Or trusted.

Quadruplet brothers. Raised in rural seclusion by their identical, namesake father. Now in their twenties, the Jake Barnes brothers are shocked by their father’s sudden suicide during one boy’s visit. More surprises come in the video he leaves behind, announcing that one of them is an unrelated outsider, and daring his sons to uncover the truth of their birth. From across the U.S. the brothers converge to find a woman who may be their mother, but twisted lust, murderous secrets, and shifting identities threaten their lives along the way.

Set in a dream-soaked reality one step removed from our own, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other is a darkly comic tale of masculine identity and relationships. What is the true nature of a man, father, brother, son, lover? Some men die searching for such truth. Some men kill to keep it hidden. Some come to wish they had never learned it. But as the four identical brothers seek out answers to who they are and where they come from, they find the truth to be as elusive as fog on the Oregon coast or as treacherous as sand in a Texas dust storm.

Suicide, homicide, fratricide, incest—it’s a love story. And a page turner. With very dark humor. Hell, it’s better than Cirque de Soleil. David Lynch meets Neil Bartlett? A Tennessee Williams-penned Twilight Zone episode with a Magnetic Fields soundtrack? Clive Barker meets Brazil meets Fight Club? David Cronenberg directs a queer Ordinary People?

Buch bestellen bei:

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Rick Copp: The Actor’s Guide to Greed (Verlag: Kensington)
Verlagstext:
Dying isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

Getting butchered at the hands of a serial killer in the “high concept” slasher film, Creeps, was supposed to revive former child star Jarrod Jarvis’s career. Instead, it’s a celluloid Titanic that makes Patty Duke’s turn in Valley of the Dolls look like Swedish art house restraint. While nursing his wounds at the post-premiere party at a Starbucks on Beverly Boulevard, Jarrod runs into Wallace Goodwin, one of the former writers on Go to Your Room, the beloved eighties show that made Jarrod a star. He’s shocked to discover that the neurotic, egotistical Wallace, whose biggest claim to fame was penning a very special episode of a Marla Gibbs sitcom and marrying leggy sexpot Katrina, has penned a play bound for London’s West End, with a scene-stealing part for Jarrod. Like they say, when God closes a door, somewhere, he opens a window seat in coach.

Faster than he can say his catchphrase, “Baby, don’t even go there!” Jarrod’s hitting the boards in London…and the boards are hitting back, big time. As much as the actors all seem to loathe one another, they truly resent Jarrod. The hotshot young director with a thing for girls named Kate berates him at every turn. British legend Dame Sylvia Horner is so sloshed she can barely read her lines. Bollywood beefcake Akshay Kapoor’s one facial expression seems to be handsome glowering—when he isn’t making eyes at Jarrod’s hunky LAPD boyfriend, Charlie. And since coming out has made him hot again, Sir Anthony Stiles wastes no time “tutoring” every young actor in a twelve-mile radius. Jarrod’s only friend in the cast is the formidable Claire Richards. The sexy, forty-something, champagne-swilling, Oscar-winning actress is the undisputed star of the show—a lady who can chew scenery and her costars with equal abandon. No one can play a death scene like La Claire. Except that this time, the diva isn’t faking it. She’s been poisoned, and the last person to see her alive was Jarrod himself. Suddenly, Jarrod’s gone from begging for a small role as a lab assistant on Crossing Jordan to being accused of murdering a shining star of the West End theatre scene and stealing her Oscar from her dressing room.

It’s the juiciest scandal to hit London since Prince Harry got caught smoking pot, and Jarrod has no intention of clicking his heels three times while repeating, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” He’s going to find out who murdered Claire, clear his own name, and head back to the insanity he knows and trusts in Los Angeles. What becomes clear is that there was more backstage drama going on than anything happening on stage—affairs, lies, secrets, betrayals, blackmail, and a desperate clawing for fame and fortune that makes anything on reality TV look like a kids’ show.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Dorien Grey: The Paper Mirror (Verlag: GLB Publishers)
Verlagstext/Kurzbesprechung:
The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey is the tenth in the gay mystery series. This time Hardesty Investigations is asked to look into a suspicious death at the newly opened library specializing in queer culture. With a list of suspects that include a dishonest author with a taste for debauchery, a prominent businessman whose family secrets may destroy his social position, and an over-ambitious cataloguer with a flair for blackmail, Dick has to hit the books to discover the killer before someone else gets taken out of circulation.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Michael Allen Dymmoch: White Tiger (Verlag: St. Martins Minotaur)
Verlagstext:
John Thinnes, a detective on the Chicago police force, and Jack Caleb, a well-known psychiatrist, were friends—unlikely friends, maybe, with very different lives, but men who liked and respected each other. And they had one significant experience in common: Both had been “in country” in Vietnam during the war. Their “labels” were different—Thinnes had been in the military police, Caleb a medic, a conscientious objector who chose to fight with his medical equipment and his ability as a doctor as his weapons, whether his patients were wounded on the field of battle or on the crowded, dangerous streets of Saigon. Arriving home, both men would have liked to forget the horrors of that war but could not banish them from their memory. They had left Vietnam, but Vietnam would never leave them.

In the years since the war ended, Thinnes married and fathered a son, Caleb prospered with his psychiatric practice and found a gay lover. Later, a series of murders and rapes brought the police officer and the psychiatrist together in an oddly matched friendship, each contributing his special knowledge to try to solve crimes that were hard to unravel.

But memories remain—ugly memories of maiming and killing on both sides, not only of soldiers but of innocent Vietnamese farmers and their families, of drug dealers and the city’s poor. And now, on a morning shortly into the new millennium, Jack Caleb is listening to the radio and hears of the shooting death of a Vietnamese immigrant woman in Chicago’s “Little Saigon,” and a flashback leaves him trembling.

Thinnes’s reaction to the murder is of a different kind. He had been assigned to the murder case, but when his lieutenant learns that Thinnes had known the dead woman in Saigon, had even attended her marriage to his now-dead buddy, he takes him off the case, leaving Thinnes’s partner to use her outstanding talents as a detective under the officer who takes John Thinnes’s place.

This, however, does not stop Thinnes from doggedly continuing the search for the woman’s killer. Word on the street in Little Saigon is that the “White Tiger” is now in Chicago. “White Tiger” is the only known name for a mysterious and savage drug dealer and all-around criminal who terrorized even the toughest thugs in Vietnam.

Both men dig, together and each in his own way, for the reason this innocent woman was murdered, both thoroughly aware that by searching in the deep, they are offering their own lives to the Tiger’s wrath.

Michael Allen Dymmoch has faultlessly linked the horrors of the war in Vietnam, from the viewpoints of those on both sides of the conflict and also from the hearts and minds of two very different men, and has woven them into a thrilling story of terror in the past and in the very present Now.

Buch bestellen bei:

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W. Randy Haynes: Cajun Snuff (Verlag: Publish America)
Verlagstext:
Loner. Free spirit. Rebel. Not words normally associated with an agent of the ultra-conservative FBI Counterterrorism Division. When the mutilated body of a black U.S. Congressman and Christian minister was found in the steamy bayous of southwestern Louisiana, Special Agent Adam Stephen had the perfect qualities needed to be the lead investigator. Adam discovers that the Congressman may have appeared respectable, but finds muddy surprises and vicious enemies instead. From a New Orleans Garden District widow to a bizarre Neo-Nazi group, the suspect list reads like a recipe for a spicy bowl of swamp snake gumbo, and Adam appears to be the next ingredient.

Anmerkung zum Buchcover: Das auf dem Buchcover abgebildete Hakenkreuz wurde von mir verfremdet.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Lesbian Mystery

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Katherine Forrest (ed.): Women of Mystery : An Anthology (Verlag: Haworth)
Verlagstext:
Fourteen tales of mystery and murder—from the best-known lesbian mystery writers!

Settle down. Make yourself comfortable. Then pick up a gripping book that’ll keep you up all night! Harrington Park Press proudly presents Women of Mystery, an anthology of short lesbian suspense fiction from the best known lesbian mystery writers in the business. Edited by Katherine V. Forrest, author of the three-time Lambda Literary Award-winning Kate Delafield mystery series, this book contains an unprecedented collection of never-before-published stories of mystery and imagination that’ll keep you thrilled as well as enthralled. A top-notch selection of mystery literature so good, it ought to be illegal!

Some of the riveting stories in Women of Mystery:

  • A deaf woman’s attention to music helps unravel a murder
  • A woman’s visit to the hereafter and back again—to stop her own murder!
  • A small child’s discovery that answers questions that affect the rest of her life
  • The menacing of two women by three men in the backwoods—and the event’s surprising outcome
  • A woman’s kidnapping—and her imaginative escape
  • A woman’s love gone horribly wrong
  • A woman suspects her lover to be—a werewolf!
  • A woman detective doggedly pursues a murderer who kills by hit and run
  • and many more tales of mystery and suspense!

Women of Mystery features works by:

  • Katherine V. Forrest
  • J. L. Belrose
  • Victoria A. Brownworth
  • Ouida Crozier
  • Joan Drury
  • Jeane Harris
  • Karla Jay
  • Lisa Liel
  • Randye Lordon
  • Carole Spearin McCauley
  • Diana McRae
  • Martha Miller
  • J. M. Redmann
  • Ursula Steck

Women of Mystery is a collection of the highest quality lesbian mystery short fiction, written for the true lover of a good mystery.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Ellen Hart: The Iron Girl (Verlag: St. Martins Minotaur)
Verlagstext:
Ray Lawless, prominent defense attorney and father of Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless, tries his biggest case yet defending an accused serial murderer and arsonist whom the media has dubbed „The Fireman.“ Ray’s client is eventually convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, though he proclaims his innocence to the end, and a few days later, he kills himself in his cell.

But someone in The Fireman’s life can’t let go, and, blaming Ray for the man’s death, plots a meticulous revenge. Both Jane and her brother Peter, who is already under terrible stress because of a troubled marriage, feel the heat of the avenger’s plan.

But Jane is intimately familiar with danger, and she’s never been one to shrink from a fight. With the help of her best friend Cordelia, Jane sets out to discover why this person is so determined to undo her family. When she begins to dig into The Fireman’s life, the puzzle unravels, leading Jane to a final confrontation with someone bent on making the Lawlesses pay, perhaps with their lives.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Alicia Gaspar De Alba: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (Verlag: Arte Público Press)
Verlagstext:
It’s the summer of 1998 and for five years over a hundred mangled and desecrated bodies have been found dumped on the Chihuahua desert outside of Juárez, México, just across the river from El Paso, Texas. The perpetrators of the ever-rising number of violent deaths target poor young women, terrifying inhabitants of both sides of the border.

El Paso native Ivon Villa has returned to her hometown to adopt the baby of Cecilia, a pregnant maquiladora worker in Juárez. When Cecilia turns up strangled and disemboweled in the desert, Ivon is thrown into the churning chaos of abuse and murder. Even as the rapes and killings of “girls from the south” continue—their tragic stories written in desert blood—a conspiracy covers up the crimes that implicate everyone from the Maquiladora Association to the Border Patrol.

When Ivon’s younger sister gets kidnapped in Juárez, Ivon knows that it’s up to her to find her sister, whatever it takes. Despite the sharp warnings she gets from family, friends, and nervous officials, Ivon’s investigation moves her deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of silence.

From acclaimed poet and prose-writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders is a gripping thriller that ponders the effects of patriarchy, gender identity, border culture, transnationalism, and globalization on an international crisis.

Buch bestellen bei:

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Penny Mickelbury:Darkness Descending (Verlag: Kings Crossing Publish)
Verlagstext:
In this sophisticated and intriguing fourth novel Mickelbury is masterful in her exploration of the underground world of the Ags, Doms and down-low brothas and the hidden worlds in which they live. Mimi Patterson, the passionate, resourceful investigative reporter and her partner, the impassioned Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of D.C.’s Hate Crimes Unit find balance with each other while seeking those that hate enough to commit blackmail, rape and murder when darkness descends on the city.

Zur Zeit nicht bei amzon.de, libri.de und buch24.de gelistet.

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Radclyffe: Justice Served (Verlag: Bold Strokes)
Verlagstext:
The hunt for an informant in the ranks draws Lieutenant Rebecca Frye, her lover Doctor Catherine Rawlings, and Officer Dellon Mitchell into a deadly game of hide and seek with an underworld kingpin who traffics in human souls.

Buch bestellen bei:

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